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Why Antisemitism, Anger and Intolerance Have Infected America’s Ivy League Colleges — Part Two
We recently examined the alarming escalation in antisemitism seen on US college campuses — specifically at the Ivy League universities of Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Columbia — since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7.
In this second part, we will look at the remaining four Ivy Leagues, charting how America’s most elite educational establishments have become havens of intolerance, and why so many of their students harbor such hatred toward both Jews and the State of Israel.
University of Pennsylvania
Two weeks before Hamas’ barbaric rampage through southern Israeli communities resulted in the biggest loss of Jewish life in a day since the Holocaust, the University of Pennsylvania was embroiled in an antisemitism scandal when notorious Jew-hating musician Roger Waters was invited to speak on campus during an anti-Israel festival.
Waters, who is best known as a founding member of the rock band Pink Floyd and for goose-stepping on-stage while dressed as a Nazi, was asked to address attendees at the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” before he was banned from campus following a backlash by critics who had noted that the event was scheduled to coincide with the Jewish High Holiday period, thus reducing the likelihood of Jewish students protesting antisemitic speakers.
In the lead-up to the festival, which went ahead as scheduled with Waters speaking remotely, numerous incidents of antisemitism were recorded on campus, including a swastika that was drawn inside the school’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and the arrest of a man who entered the Penn Hillel and screamed statements such as, “F—k the Jews” and “They killed JC,” a reference to the myth that Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
In light of the Waters controversy, UPenn President Liz Magill belatedly announced her personal commitment to addressing antisemitism at the college, adding: “The University of Pennsylvania has a long and proud history of being a place for people of all backgrounds and faiths, and acts of antisemitism have no place at Penn.”
How utterly hollow those words were.
In the days and weeks after Hamas terrorists murdered and kidnapped more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, UPenn has again allowed antisemitism to rear its head on campus.
The university administration’s first statement to condemn the Hamas atrocity was more than a week after the massacre took place. On Sunday, October 15, Magill sent an email to the university community. “I want to leave no doubt about where I stand,” it said. “I, and this university, are horrified by and condemn Hamas’s terrorist assault on Israel and their violent atrocities against civilians. There is no justification — none — for these heinous attacks…”
However, the email apparently only came after Jon Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah and former US ambassador to China, Russia, and Singapore, told Magill that his charitable organization, the Huntsman Foundation, would be pulling donations from the university over the issue of antisemitism.
For some UPenn students, though, the email’s failure to mention Palestinians was akin to not recognizing their “existence,” and they organized a mass walkout of classes in response.
Videos and photos taken of the protest show students chanting slogans such as, “Intifada, Intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” A handful of students reportedly harassed a rabbi who was manning a tefillin stand on the route marchers took.
Other wealthy UPenn donors have since followed Huntsman’s lead and pulled funding from the college, including Marc Rowan, who contributed more than $50 million in 2018, and Steve Eisman, who demanded his name be removed from a university scholarship.
NEW Canary Mission profile. Tara Tarawneh, a student at @Penn & writer for Penn’s student newspaper, glorified the massacre of Jews at a pro-Hamas rally: “I remember feeling so empowered and happy…I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts.” https://t.co/38Lj7qBtQ5 pic.twitter.com/MxDrYMLGWx
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 5, 2023
Princeton University
In August of this year, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli wrote a letter to Princeton University’s senior leadership about a book that was approved to go on the syllabus of the Near Eastern Studies Department’s “Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South” course.
The book, “The Healing Humanities: The Right to Maim,” written by Jasbir Puar, falsely claims that Israel harvests the organs of Palestinians and that the country has a policy of trying to maim Palestinians.
Despite the text promoting a modern-day blood libel, Princeton’s President Christopher L. Eisgruber refused to remove the text from the syllabus on the grounds that it would be “censoring” the curriculum.
“Those who disagree with a book, or a syllabus, are free to criticize it but not to censor it,” he wrote. “Such arguments are the lifeblood of a great university, where controversies must be addressed through deliberation and debate, not administrative fiat.”
However, one must question the sincerity of Eisgruber’s view about fighting censorship, considering the fact that under his tenure, Princeton scrubbed the name of America’s 28th President, Woodrow Wilson, from its public policy school on the basis that Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms.”
Incidentally, as Michael Goldstein pointed out in the Jewish Journal, the inclusion of Puar’s antisemitic tome in the curriculum actually marked the second time the “Israelis harvest Palestinian organs” blood libel had been legitimized on campus. Just months before the Puar controversy, professional Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who has accused Israelis of eating Palestinian organs and lusting after their blood, was paid to give the Edward Said lecture at the university’s English Department.
Many in Princeton’s undergraduate student body have also been gunning to pass a resolution in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which seeks to isolate and eventually dismantle the Jewish state.
What followed a March 2022 vote on BDS was reminiscent of something out of a banana republic. In total, 44 percent of students voted in favor, 40 percent voted against, and 16 percent abstained, which was supposed to mean the resolution immediately failed, because abstentions prevented a majority.
However, a dispute ensued about how abstentions would be counted, with Eric Periman, then-president of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP), which sponsored the resolution, arguing the pro-BDS camp had won.
Around the same time that PCP was pushing for Princeton to support BDS, the group made crystal clear its real target when it held a protest outside the campus Center for Jewish Life (CJL), in which protestors held signs with phrases commonly used by Hamas such as, “from the river to the sea” and during which PCP President Periman suggested Princeton’s Jewish students were complicit in human rights violations.
Dartmouth College
Two pro-Palestinian students were arrested at Dartmouth last month after they allegedly trespassed on the grounds of the university’s Parkhurst Hall late at night and threatened to “escalate” and take “physical action” against college administrators in a document titled the “Dartmouth New Deal,” which demands the school divest from “Israeli apartheid.”
“You have until the first day of the winter term to publicly address our demands and outline a plan to meet them. If you fail to do so, we will escalate and take further action,” the document reportedly warned.
The arrests followed at least one pro-Palestinian rally in which attendees reportedly chanted, “Israel is a terror state.”
Breaking News:
Around 1AM today, Hanover Police arrested two pro-Palestinian protesters who were camped on Parkhurst Hall’s front lawn, charging them with a misdemeanor for criminal trespassing. The two students were released on bail later in the morning. pic.twitter.com/PSNBncJ0SC
— The Dartmouth Review (@DartmouthReview) October 28, 2023
However, while Dartmouth has grappled with more isolated incidents of anti-Jewish hatred on campus, including a swastika being carved on the college green and a public menorah being shot at with pellets, it should be noted that the general response by the university leadership to the Israel-Hamas war last month has been commendable.
Spearheaded by a group of Middle Eastern academics at the college, two public forums were set up on October 9 that featured professors from Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt discussing the conflict, which were attended by hundreds of students in-person and online.
Encouraging students to attend the forums, the university’s President Sian Leah said: “I watched with growing horror the Hamas attack on Israel this weekend, the escalating violence, and the devastating loss of life, especially among civilians… In every conflict, one of the most important roles a university can play is to help us understand it, and to make a space for dialogue and community.”
Leah’s dither-free response to the attacks, which was in stark contrast to the leaders of so many other colleges, was a welcome change from her predecessor Philip Hanlon, whose role in attempting to hire BDS-supporting Professor N. Bruce Duthu as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had been criticized as another “chapter in the school’s history of anti-Semitism.”
Brown University
Brown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an organization that has a well-documented history of disseminating vicious anti-Israel propaganda and vilifying Jewish students, was already organizing pro-Palestinian campus protests as Hamas terrorists were still cutting their bloodsoaked path through southern Israel.
In addition to organizing several student walkouts, the group posted on October 12 a statement to its Instagram account in which it claimed Israel was responsible for the Hamas massacre, and stated that it stands in “solidarity with the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.”
At one such campus rally, an SJP member was captured on film telling the crowd: “Palestinians will die for justice and will die to return to our land. Glory to our martyrs from the river to the sea … Palestine is the hope of the world.”
Apparently, explicitly supporting a proscribed terrorist organization that is sworn to the destruction of both Jews and Israel is not enough to get the group banned from Brown’s campus.
Although Brown University’s President Christina H. Paxson has opposed calls for the college to adopt a pro-BDS stance, the school’s response to antisemitism among the Brown community has been criticized, particularly after several high-profile incidents at the college over the past two years, including swastikas drawn around campus and antisemitic threats directed toward Brown Hillel.
It is not so difficult to explain why so many students — many of whom would proudly describe themselves as “anti-fascist” — are so intolerant toward Jews and Israel.
Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim described the scenes on American campuses as a product of the Marxist theories that have been taught for decades in higher education establishments:
That’s why they particularly hate Israel—a wealthy nation among neighbors whose poverty is relieved only by oil revenue. Israel is the one country in the Middle East where ordinary people stand a good chance of creating prosperity for themselves and their families. For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors.”
And that is the crux of it: for American students, Israel and Jews are privileged, and privilege is the new original sin.
The post Why Antisemitism, Anger and Intolerance Have Infected America’s Ivy League Colleges — Part Two first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Netanyahu Says Ready to Implement Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire, Biden Announces Truce to Begin Wednesday
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Feb. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was ready to implement a ceasefire deal with Lebanon and would respond forcefully to any violation by Hezbollah, declaring Israel would retain “complete military freedom of action.”
In a television address, Netanyahu said he would put the ceasefire accord to his full cabinet later in the evening. The more restricted security cabinet had earlier approved the deal by a majority of 10 ministers to one.
“Israel appreciates the US contribution to the process, and reserves the right to act against any threat to its security,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.
The accord was brokered by the United States and France and was expected to take effect on Wednesday.
“We will enforce the agreement and respond forcefully to any violation. Together, we will continue until victory,” Netanyahu said in his television address.
Netanyahu said there were three reasons to pursue a ceasefire: to focus on the threat from Iran, which backs the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah; replenish depleted arms supplies and give the army a rest; and to isolate Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that triggered war in the region when it attacked Israel from Gaza last Oct. 7.
“In full coordination with the United States, we retain complete military freedom of action. Should Hezbollah violate the agreement or attempt to rearm, we will strike decisively.”
Netanyahu said Hezbollah — which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon and is allied to Hamas, another Iran-backed Islamist group — was considerably weaker than it had been at the start of the conflict.
“We have set it back decades, eliminated … its top leaders, destroyed most of its rockets and missiles, neutralized thousands of fighters, and obliterated years of terror infrastructure near our border,” he said.
“We targeted strategic objectives across Lebanon, shaking Beirut to its core.”
US President Joe Biden was set to deliver remarks at the White House at 2:30 pm EST (1930 GMT).
ISRAEL RAMPS UP AIRSTRIKES
Despite the diplomatic breakthrough, hostilities raged as Israel dramatically ramped up its campaign of airstrikes in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, with health authorities reporting at least 18 killed.
There was no indication that a truce in Lebanon would hasten a ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza, where Israel is battling Hamas.
The Lebanon ceasefire agreement requires Israeli troops to withdraw from south Lebanon and Lebanon’s army to deploy in the region, officials say. Hezbollah would end its armed presence along the border south of the Litani River.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the Lebanese army would be ready to have at least 5,000 troops deployed in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops withdraw, and that the United States could play a role in rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by Israeli strikes.
Not everyone in Israel supports a ceasefire. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing member of Netanyahu’s government, said on social-media platform X the agreement does not ensure the return of Israelis to their homes in the country’s north and that the Lebanese army did not have the ability to overcome Hezbollah.
“In order to leave Lebanon, we must have our own security belt,” Ben-Gvir said.
Israel demands effective UN enforcement of an eventual ceasefire with Lebanon and will show “zero tolerance” toward any infraction, Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier on Tuesday.
In the hours before the announcement, Israeli strikes smashed more of Beirut’s densely-populated southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Israeli military said one barrage of strikes had hit 20 targets in the city in just 120 seconds, killing at least seven people and injuring 37, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Israel issued its biggest evacuation warning yet, telling civilians to leave 20 locations. Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said the air force was conducting a “widespread attack” on Hezbollah targets across the city.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah has kept up rocket fire into Israel.
Israel has dealt Hezbollah massive blows since going on the offensive against the group in September, killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders, and pounding areas of Lebanon where the group holds sway.
Over the past year, more than 3,750 people have been killed in Lebanon and over one million have been forced from their homes, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures.
Hezbollah strikes have killed 45 civilians in northern Israel and the Golan Heights. At least 73 Israeli soldiers have been killed in northern Israel, the Golan Heights and in combat in southern Lebanon, according to Israeli authorities.
Hezbollah has been launching barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel from neighboring Lebanon almost daily since Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state from Gaza to the south.
The relentless attacks from Hezbollah have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes in the north, and Israel has pledged to ensure their safe return.
Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah before drastically escalating its military operations over the last two months, seeking to push the terrorist army further away from the border with Lebanon.
The post Netanyahu Says Ready to Implement Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire, Biden Announces Truce to Begin Wednesday first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Islamic Group CAIR Ordered by Federal Judge to Reveal Funding Sources
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been ordered by a US federal judge to reveal its funding sources, potentially opening up the controversial group, some of whose leadership had early connections with organizations linked to Hamas, to further scrutiny.
US Magistrate Judge David Schultz ordered CAIR to open its books following an unsuccessful attempt to countersue a former employee for defamation, the New York Post first reported on Monday night. Schultz asserted that information regarding the organization’s financial history and assets were within “scope of permissible discovery.”
CAIR originally filed a lawsuit against former chapter leader Lori Saroya, accusing the ex-employee of engaging in “defamation” against the organization by exposing its alleged ties to terrorist groups and funding by foreign governments. After CAIR eventually dropped its lawsuit in January 2022, Saroya slapped the organization with a lawsuit of her own, accusing the group of defaming her character.
Saroya’s lawyer, Jeffrey Robbins, told the Post that CAIR will be forced to “turn over evidence about everything from fundraising practices, such as having raised money from foreign sources and concealed it; whether it deceived donors; whether it mismanaged donor money; whether it retaliated against employees or threatened to retaliate against employees for raising concerns about sexual harassment or the like.”
Shultz, a Minnesota district judge, cited how the organization claimed that its former employee “falsely implied CAIR received funding from foreign governments and terrorists when she stated CAIR accepted ‘international funding through their Washington Trust Foundation.’”
The judge asserted that “discovery into these matters is proportionate to the needs of the case.”
CAIR has long been a controversial organization. In the 2000s, it was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves been embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
Awad was referring to the blockade that Israel and Egypt enforced on Gaza after Hamas took control of the Palestinian enclave in 2007, to prevent the terrorist group from importing weapons and other materials and equipment for attacks.
About a week later, the executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, said that Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence. He added in his sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City that for the Palestinians, “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
The post US Islamic Group CAIR Ordered by Federal Judge to Reveal Funding Sources first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Massachusetts Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Jews, Bomb Synagogues
A woman walks past the US Department of Justice Building, in Washington, DC, Dec. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Al Drago
The US Department of Justice has secured the conviction of a Massachusetts man who threatened to perpetrate mass killings of Jews, according to a new announcement by the agency.
Over several months, John Reardon, 59, called Jewish institutions across Massachusetts, proclaiming that he would kill Jewish men, women, and children in their houses of worship. His terroristic menacing included promises to plant bombs in synagogues in the cities of Sharon and Attleboro, as well as making 98 calls to the Israeli Consulate in Boston, a behavior which began on Oct. 7, 2023 and ended just days before his apprehension by law enforcement in January.
Reardon has declined to contest the federal government’s case against him and pled guilty on Monday to stalking, threatening “force” to obstruct religious freedom, and transmitting threats “in interstate commerce.” He faces up to 30 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.
“This defendant’s threats to bomb synagogues and kill Jewish children stoked fear in the hearts of congregants at a time when Jews are already facing a disturbing increase in threats,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “No person and no community in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence. The Justice Department is committed to using the full force of our investigative and prosecutorial authorities to root out these threats and ensure that all people are protected in the expression of their faith.”
FBI Boston Field Special Agent in Charge Jodi Cohen added, “When John Reardon threatened to kill members of the Jewish community and bomb places of worship, the FBI and our partners immediately mobilized. After all, you cannon call and threaten people with violent physical harm and not face repercussions. People of all races and faiths deserve to feel safe in their communities. With today’s guilty plea, John Reardon is now a convicted felon.”
Reardon’s conviction came amid a record surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes across the US following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
Earlier this month, for example, law enforcement officials convicted a white supremacist who repeatedly vandalized a synagogue in Eugene, Oregon during spree of hate in 2023.
Motivated by antisemitism, Adam Edward Braun, 34, graffitied the Temple Beth Israel synagogue twice in September 2023, spraying “1377” for its resemblance to “1488,” a reference to Adolf Hitler and a white nationalist slogan. He came back several months later to vandalize the glazing of the synagogue’s entrance. However, he abandoned that activity after spotting a surveillance camera and opted to graffiti “white power” elsewhere on the grounds.
In addition to prison, Braun faces a maximum $100,000 fine, the total amount of which will be determined when he is sentenced in February by US District Court Judge Michael J. McShane. He has agreed to “pay restitution in full to the victim.”
In late September, federal prosecutors helped convict a gunman who shot two Jewish men as they exited a synagogue in Los Angeles.
Jaime Tran, 30 — an affiliate of the “Goyim Defense League” hate group — had gone on an antisemitic shooting spree in February 2023, attempting to murder two Jewish men in the Pico-Robertson section of Los Angeles. Prior to the crimes, Tran called Jews “primitive” and told a former classmate, “Someone is going to kill you, Jew” and “I want you dead, Jew.” According to the Justice Department, he even described himself as a “ticking time bomb,” broadcasting his murderous ideation to all who knew him.
Tran pled guilty in June to four charges the Justice Department described as “hate crimes with intent to kill” and “using, carrying, and discharging a firearm” in the commission of an act of violence. His sentencing of 35 years ensures that he will not again be free until the year 2059.
“After two years of spewing antisemitic vitriol, the defendant planned and carried out a two-day attack attempting to murder Jews leaving synagogue in Los Angeles,” Garland said at the time. “Vile acts of antisemitic hatred endanger the safety of individuals and entire communities, and allowing such crimes to go unchecked endangers the foundation of our democracy itself.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Massachusetts Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Jews, Bomb Synagogues first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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