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US Lawmakers Grill Elite University Presidents on Raging Campus Antisemitism
University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill testifies about campus antisemitism before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5, 2023. Photo: Screenshot
US lawmakers on Tuesday held a highly anticipated hearing on surging antisemitism at American universities, with members of both political parties directing sharp questions at three elite university presidents about deep hostility to Israel and the Jewish community on their campuses.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce organized the hearing — titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” — amid an alarming spike in antisemitic incidents, including demonstrations calling for Israel’s destruction and the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students, at college campuses across the US.
Some of America’s most elite universities have become hubs of such activity, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
For over three hours, presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT largely evaded questions about the consequences of antisemitic incidents on their campuses, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — which governs access to educational information and records by public entities — while declining to confirm whether students had been disciplined for antisemitic harassment.
All three administrators vowed to vigorously combat antisemitism but denied that their universities were responsible for fostering it, calling the rise in anti-Jewish hate a societal problem.
Addressing Jewish students’ complaints of anti-Israel bias in the classroom, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) asked Gay whether a lack of intellectual diversity on elite college campuses tips the balance of ideas in favor of far left academics who use their platforms to promote extremist anti-Zionist viewpoints.
“What I’m focused on is making sure that we are bringing the most academically talented faculty to the campus and that they’re effective in the classroom,” Gay said.
Magill also came under fire. Since September, her administration has been excoriated for refusing to cancel an anti-Zionist festival that featured several speakers who have been accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracies and violence against Israel. The school refused to cancel the event or ask that it be hosted off-campus. Last month, Magill expressed regret and apologized for not promptly condemning the festival.
“Antisemitism has no place at Penn, and our free speech policies are guided by the United States Constitution,” Magill said, responding to questions about former Pink Floyd vocalist Roger Waters’ invitation to the event. A recent documentary exposed several of Waters’ inflammatory antisemitic statements.
“Our approach to speech, as I identified, it follows and is guided by the United States Constitution, which allows for robust perspectives,” Magill said.
During questioning by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who was recently accused of minimizing the Hamas terror group’s mass rapes of Israeli women during its Oct. 7 massacre, Kornbluth said she was “deeply troubled” by recent events and overseeing several faculty attempts aimed at cooling the campus climate.
“There have been lunches, there have been meetings for our Israeli and Jewish students with Jewish faculty, for our Arab students with Arab and Muslim faculty, but now they’re working to figure out how to bring them together,” she said. “If we’re all going to live together and work together collectively, we have to move beyond formal training, which we are committed to, but to actually real dialogue, and to actually model constructive and civil dialogue for our students. That’s what being in university is all about.”
MIT officials last month told Jewish students to avoid the campus’ main building after it was taken over by anti-Israel activists.
During Tuesday’s hearing, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers condemned antisemitism but also blamed the other side for allowing anti-Jewish hate to fester.
Republicans on the committee alleged that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs supported by the political left have fostered the kinds of tribalism that unleash antisemitism, and that progressives coddled pro-Hamas supporters. Democrats, meanwhile, claimed that Republicans have ignored Islamophobia and aimed to defund federal institutions that monitor civil rights violations.
Nonetheless, attempts were made at bipartisanship. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee’s chairwoman, quoted a Nov. 29 speech by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) denouncing antisemitism, although she argued he fell short of recognizing how “race-based ideology” has augmented the problem.
“Senator Schumer hasn’t put the pieces together, but the picture is all too clear now to American Jews,” Foxx said to the university presidents. “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.”
Throughout her remarks, Foxx linked what she described as Harvard’s far left curriculum to its students blaming Israel for the Hamas atrocities across southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7. In the aftermath of the onslaught, and amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, anti-Israel students at Harvard mobbed a Jewish law student, surrounded him, and screamed “Shame!” into his ears.
In his opening remarks, the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), argued that antisemitism on college campuses “did not start with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” while charging that Republicans squandered previous opportunities to discuss campus discrimination.
“While my colleagues claim to be committed to combating discrimination on campus, they’re also contradictorily and simultaneously stoking culture wars that can be divisive and discriminatory,” Scott charged. “Moreover, House Republicans are proposing significant cuts to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the very office responsible for upholding students’ civil rights and investigating discrimination claims. You can’t have it both ways.”
Tuesday’s hearing came days after a new poll, released by Hillel International, found that 37 percent of Jewish college students have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity on campus since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered and 240 others taken as hostages into Gaza. The survey also found that 35 percent of respondents said there have been acts of hate or violence against Jews on campus. A majority of those surveyed said they were unsatisfied with their university’s response to those incidents.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Rejects US Nuclear Proposal, Says ‘Counteroffer’ Coming as Talks Stall Over Uranium Enrichment, Sanctions
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran has denounced the latest nuclear proposal from the United States as “unprofessional and untechnical,” reaffirming the country’s right to enrich uranium and announcing plans to present a counteroffer in the coming days.
“After receiving the American proposal regarding the Iranian nuclear program, we are now preparing a counteroffer,” Ali Shamkhnai, political adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Shamkhani criticized the White House draft proposal as “not well thought out,” emphasizing its alleged failure to address sanction relief — a key demand for Tehran under any deal with Washington.
“There is no mention whatsoever of lifting sanctions in the latest American proposal, even though the issue of sanctions is a fundamental matter for Iran,” Shamkhnai said.
The Iranian official also warned that Tehran will not allow the US to dismantle its “peaceful nuclear program” or force uranium enrichment down to zero.
“Iran will never relinquish its natural rights,” Shamkhani said.
Washington’s draft proposal for a new nuclear deal was delivered by Omani officials — who have been mediating negotiations between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff — during last month’s talks in Rome.
On Wednesday, Khamenei dismissed such an offer, saying it “contradicts our nation’s belief in self-reliance” and runs counter to Iran’s key objectives.
“The proposal that the Americans have presented is 100 percent against our interests,” the Iranian leader said during a televised speech.
“The rude and arrogant leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should not have a nuclear program. Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” Khamenei continued.
After five rounds of talks, diplomatic efforts have yet to yield results as both adversaries clash over Iran’s demand to maintain its domestic uranium enrichment program — a condition the White House has firmly rejected.
In April, Tehran and Washington held their first official nuclear negotiation since the US withdrew from a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that had imposed temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief.
Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has sought to curtail Tehran’s potential to develop a nuclear weapon that could spark a regional arms race and pose a threat to Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran seeks to have Western sanctions on its oil-dependent economy lifted, while maintaining its nuclear enrichment program — which the country insists is solely for civilian purposes.
As part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon — Washington has been targeting Tehran’s oil industry with mounting sanctions.
Amid the ongoing diplomatic deadlock, Israel has declared it will never allow the Islamist regime to acquire nuclear weapons, as the country views Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to uphold any agreement that prevents Tehran from enriching uranium.
“But in any case, Israel maintains the right to defend itself from a regime that is threatening to annihilate it,” Netanyahu said in a press conference last month, following reports that Jerusalem could strike Iranian nuclear sites if ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran fail.
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Day After Colorado Attack, Founder of Anti-Israel Group Chides Activists Who Are Insufficiently ‘Pro-Resistance’
Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of WithinOurLifetime (WOL), leading a pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City on Aug. 14, 2024. Photo: Michael Nigro via Reuters Connect
Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of the radical anti-Israel organization Within Our Lifetime, chastised those within the pro-Palestinian movement who only support “resistance” in the abstract but not in practice following Sunday’s antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado.
“A lot of people who call themselves anti-Zionist or pro-resistance don’t actually understand what resistance is,” Kiswani posted on X/Twitter on Monday. “They support it in theory, but when it shows up in practice, they hesitate, distance themselves, or shift the conversation entirely.”
She continued, “And it makes it even harder for those of us who are principled to take public stances. We’re already marginalized, already painted as extreme or dangerous and that isolation only deepens when others in the movement won’t stand firm when it counts.”
Kiswani’s comments came the day after a man threw Molotov cocktails at a Boulder gathering where participants were rallying in support of the Israeli hostages who remain in captivity in Gaza — which resulted in 15 injuries, including some critically, in what US authorities called a targeted terrorist attack. Her tweets also came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. In both attacks, the perpetrator yelled “Free Palestine” as they targeted innocent civilians, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
After Kiswani’s social media posts sparked some backlash among pro-Israel users on X, she provided limited pushback on the idea that it was an expression of support for the prior day’s attack in Colorado.
“Zionists are freaking out in the QTs about this, insisting it’s about Colorado,” she wrote. “Newsflash: the world doesn’t revolve around you. Resistance hasn’t stopped in Gaza, look at what just happened in Jabalia [where three IDF soldiers were killed] for instance. The perpetual victimhood is getting old.”
However, Kiswani did not say her comment had no connection to the attack in Colorado, and she did not say that she opposed the firebombing.
Kiswani and her group, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), have been at the forefront of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas activism since Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people and abducted 251 hostages during their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a massacre that started the war in Gaza.
On Oct. 8, 2023, one day after the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, WOL organized a protest to celebrate the prior day’s attack, which it described as an effort to “defend the heroic Palestinian resistance.” Kiswani notably refused to condemn Hamas and the Oct. 7 massacre following the atrocities.
Then, in Apil 2024, Kiswani refused to condemn the chant “Death to America” and organized a mass demonstration to block the “arteries of capitalism” by staging a blockade of commercial shipping ports across the world in protest of Western support for the Jewish state. That same month, she was banned from Columbia University’s campus in New York City after leading chants calling for an “intifada,” or violent uprising.
The following month, Kiswani led a demonstration in Brooklyn, New York in which she lambasted the local police department, claimed then-US President Joe Biden will soon die, and called for the destruction of Israel.
That proceeded the activist saying she does not want Zionists “anywhere” in the world while speaking in defense of a person who called for “Zionists” to leave a crowded subway car in New York City.
WOL, which planned a protest last year to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, was also behind demonstrations at the Nova Music Festival exhibit, which commemorated the more than 300 civilians slaughtered by Hamas while at a music festival.
The latter protest prompted widespread condemnation, including from Biden and even progressive members of the US Congress who are outspoken against Israel.
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, posted on social media that the “callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple.”
The post Day After Colorado Attack, Founder of Anti-Israel Group Chides Activists Who Are Insufficiently ‘Pro-Resistance’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel’s Defense Exports Hit Record $15 Billion in 2024 Despite European Pressure, Calls for Arms Embargo
Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza. Photo: IDF via Reuters
Israel reached a new all-time high in defense exports in 2024, nearing $15 billion — the fourth consecutive year of record-breaking sales — despite mounting international criticism over the war in Gaza and growing pressure from European countries to suspend arms deals.
In a press release on Wednesday, Israel’s Defense Ministry announced that defense exports reached over $14.7 billion last year — a 13 percent increase from 2023 — with more than half of the deals valued at over $100 million.
According to the ministry, Israel’s military exports have more than doubled over the past five years, highlighting the industry’s rapid expansion and growing global demand.
“This tremendous achievement is a direct result of the successes of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and defense industries against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Ayatollah regime in Iran, and in additional arenas where we operate against Israel’s enemies,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
“The world sees Israeli strength and seeks to be a partner in it. We will continue strengthening the IDF and the Israeli economy through security innovation to ensure clear superiority against any threat – anywhere and anytime,” Katz continued.
In 2024, over half of the Jewish state’s defense contracts were with European countries — up from 35 percent the previous year — as many in the region have increased their defense spending following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Despite increasing pressure and widespread anti-Israel sentiment among European governments amid the current conflict in Gaza, this latest data seems to contradict recent calls by European leaders to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state over its defensive campaign in Gaza against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
On Wednesday, Germany reversed its earlier threat to halt arms deliveries to Israel, reaffirming its commitment to continue cooperation and maintain defense contracts with Jerusalem.
“Germany will continue to support the State of Israel, including with arms deliveries,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul told lawmakers in parliament.
Last week, Berlin warned it would take unspecified measures against Israel if it continued its military campaign in Gaza, citing concerns that exported weapons were being used in violation of humanitarian law.
“Our full support for the right to exist and the security of the State of Israel must not be instrumentalized for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip,” Wadephul said in a statement.
Germany would be “examining whether what is happening in the Gaza Strip is compatible with international humanitarian law,” he continued. “Further arms deliveries will be authorized based on the outcome of that review.”
Spain and Ireland are among the countries in Europe that have threatened or taken steps to limit arms deals with Israel, while others such as France have threatened unspecified harsh measures against the Jewish state.
According to the Israeli defense ministry’s report, since the outbreak of war on Oct. 7, 2023, after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, the operational successes and proven battlefield performance of Israeli systems have fueled strong international demand for Israel’s defense technology.
Last year, the export of missiles, rockets, and air defense systems reached a new high, making up 48 percent of the total deal volume — up from 36 percent in 2023.
Similarly, satellite and space systems exports surged, accounting for 8 percent of total deals in 2024 — quadrupling their share from 2 percent in 2023.
While Europe dominated Israel’s defense export market in 2024, significant portions also went to other regions. Asia and the Pacific made up 23 percent of total sales — slightly lower than in previous years, when the region approached 30 percent.
Exports to Abraham Accords countries fell to 12 percent, down from 23 percent in 2022, while North America remained stable at around 9 percent.
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