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Rape Deniers: Evidence of Hamas Sexual Assault Ignored Despite Proof (Part Two)
An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg
Where there are anti-Jewish atrocities, there are deniers. And on Oct 7, there were atrocities, including countless acts of murder and mutilation, as well as brutal acts of sexual violence by the Palestinian attackers.
In this three part series, CAMERA will expose some of these deniers, and offer irrefutable proof of the sexual abuse of Israeli women by the Palestinian attackers both during and after the October 7 atrocities.
Part One of this story laid out the facts about Hamas’ sexual violence, proof it happened, and some information about the critics who are disputing these facts. Part Two follows below.
Denial
As with the broader Hamas apologia, the forms of denial of sexual violence range from heavy-handed to more refined. Mondoweiss, for example, contends that the most well-known testimonies are “nothing more than a repetition of fake news and government propaganda.” Another writer who is a college professor describes a compendium of sexual assault charges as “a manipulative betrayal of actual victims” (emphasis added). Arun Gupta in Yes! magazine insists that “alternative explanations applies [sic] to nearly every sexual violence claim in the media.”
Others cast doubt with a bit more subtlety, arguing there is no evidence of “mass” or “systematic” rape while ignoring or dismissing all evidence of rape. Perhaps the most “generous” — and rarest — subcategory accepts that rape “may have occurred” but brushes it off as par for the course: “The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war,” shrugs The Intercept. (Their point of contention, they continue, is whether there was a “pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”)
Which brings us to some of the specific arguments by the deniers.
Argument: Rape Crisis Centers Didn’t Confirm Rapes. (They did.)
The Intercept, in its attempt to both discredit a New York Times article on sexual violence and suggest an absence of evidence of sexual violence, cite silence from Israeli rape crisis centers. Co-authors Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw point to an interview with one of the New York Times reporters, Anat Schwartz, that was recorded after the publication of her piece. They write:
In the podcast interview, Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. [emphasis added]
The Intercept authors never revisit this, leaving readers to believe the relevant professionals are unaware of any sexual assaults.
But just a week before the Intercept piece was published, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel released a report concluding that “Hamas’s attack on October 7 included brutal sexual assaults.” The report assessed open-source information as well as “information that arrived at the ARCCI from professionals and confidential calls.” It was very much a “confirmation” from rape crisis centers.
The Intercept piece, which speaks only of silence by those centers, does not mention the existence of the report.
If there’s doubt that the omission might be calculated, we should consider how the authors also cover up Schwartz’s reference to learning of a sexual assault survivor at the start of her investigation. They write:
After seeing [media] interviews [with a unit 669 paramedic who shared unfounded accounts], Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets…
If readers were to cross-check with the podcast itself, though, they would notice a glaring elision from this summary. (Or more likely, they wouldn’t notice — the interview is in Hebrew, leaving most Intercept readers unable to check for themselves.) Just after Schwartz’s reference to calling people at kibbutzim and just before her description of reaching out to the paramedic, she tells the interviewer:
Then there started to be some drips [of information], and suddenly a psychologist who worked, volunteered, with survivors of the Nova [music festival]– so she says, “Actually a woman wrote on our site that she endured sexual assault. But I’m not qualified at all to care for victims of sexual assault, so I passed her to a colleague.” [emphasis added]
It would have been impossible for The Intercept, which says it fully translated the interview, to miss Schwartz’s comment. The relevant section lasts just over a minute. Schwartz speaks of the kibbutzim for six seconds; then about the assault victim for thirty seconds; and finally then about the paramedic for roughly 20 seconds.
Claim: There is no “testimony.” (There is.)
A November headline on Haaretz reads, “The Scope of Hamas’ Campaign of Rape Against Israeli Women Is Revealed, Testimony After Testimony.”
According to Ali Abunimah and Electronic Intifada, the article itself disproves the headline, as it notes that a newly formed Israeli commission has “thus far … not taken testimony directly.” This, Abunimah insists, is a “giveaway” of foul play.
Anyone bothering to read the piece would learn that the headline is unremarkable and appropriate. The story speaks of “testimony collected by the police,” testimony “from volunteers at the forensic medicine institute,” and “testimony from Hamas terrorists.”
Argument: Shari Mendes Didn’t Mention Rape Before November. (She did.)
Shari Mendes, who worked at a makeshift morgue used to process and identify bodies from Hamas’ massacre, described evidence of sexual assault: corpses of many young women bloodied “particularly round their underwear,” others shot in the breasts, some with broken pelvises.
So Mondoweiss works to discredit her. First, the publication charges that, in her Nov. 18 interview with CNN, she appeared under a pseudonym. (She appeared under the name Shari.)
The larger attempt to discredit her focuses on a supposed inconsistency in Shari’s CNN interview: “In [a] written report in Ynet, published on October 31, 2023, she did not mention any claims of sexual violence.”
In other words, Mondoweiss casts her CNN testimony about rape as a new embellishment, because 18 days earlier she said nothing of the sort.
The “written report” cited by Mondoweiss is a news story that cites five workers at the morgue. Here, from that Hebrew article, is the entirely of the section that quotes Mendes:
“In my civilian life, I’m actually an architect,” [Shari] says, “but on October 7, the world changed, and from my routine life we went over to rooms for identification and purification of the bodies, some of which were in terrible condition, and yet, I cleaned them all with love, dedication and respect.”
As time passed, she tries to come to her senses, and it is not easy for her. “We are still shocked by the amount of evil we saw in the bodies and the condition of some of them. We still have nightmares from the smell. It will take some time before we manage to forget it.”
She says that until this interview she did not allow herself to cry. “I’m afraid that if I cry, I’ll fall apart. I’m a woman who runs away from crying and holds a passion. I also don’t let myself feel. What I want most is for every mother to know with what love and tenderness we purified her daughter,” she says.
Then she bursts into tears.
This is meant to be proof that Mendes’ dishonestly lied to CNN.
At any rate, contrary to Mondoweiss’ insinuation, Mendes did discuss evidence sexual violence before her CNN appearance, and even before the publication of the cited Ynet article.
On Oct. 20, she was quoted in the Daily Mail referring to “evidence of mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis — women, grandmothers, children.” In a video posted on Oct. 24, she notes that those at the morgue saw “genitals cut off” and stated that “woman have been raped.” Ynet itself had previously quoted a video clip in which Mendes says that morgue workers have “seen women who had been raped.” She is similarly quoted in an Oct. 30 piece on a Fox News.
Mondoweiss’ argument, then, relies not only on weak argumentation, but also egregious cherry picking.
And Rami Shmuel …
Mondoweiss pulls a similar stunt with another of CNN’s interviewees, a recovery volunteer named Rami Shmuel. Shmuel told CNN that “There is not a doubt about what our girls went through with terrorists. We found naked women stripped out without any clothes, their legs were spread out.”
Mondoweiss counters:
CNN fails to mention the fact that Rami Shmuel was not present at the festival location during the attack. According to Shmuel’s Facebook post, published on the afternoon of October 7, he was “safe” in a villa in Netivot settlement.
Shmuel claims the next day that he joined efforts to search for bodies and survivors in the area in a personal, unofficial capacity. What Shmuel told his followers on the evening of October 8 did not have any hint of sexual violence: “An hour ago, I left the area, and the scenes are very, very difficult and (…) A war zone in every sense of the word. Hundreds of abandoned bullet-riddled cars, fires still burning in some open areas.” (ellipsis in original)
No hint, they say.
The fact that Shmuel was not at the festival is irrelevant — a red herring with no value beyond throwing off readers. His discussion on CNN is about recovery efforts after the massacre.
More strikingly, although Mondoweiss holds up the Oct. 8 Facebook post as if it is the extent of Shmuel’s testimony, it only represents a sliver of the picture. Shmuel was in the field for 10 days, during which his posts went well beyond references to abandoned cars.
On Oct. 9, he wrote that with every hour that passes and every bit of territory wrested from Hamas, “the magnitude of the disaster, the cruelty of the human animals, and the severe horrors are revealed.” Like in his Oct. 8 post, he shares no specifics about the human impact. Are we meant to conclude from this that he saw no victims?
On Oct. 10, he described a “difficult night” during which the “reality of the great horrors and the disaster” hit him and, for a brief moment, he “cried like a child broken to pieces.” And later that day: “The sights and stories I was exposed to in the last days are something I will never forget until the day I die.”
On Oct. 11, he wrote of “another day of being exposed to horrors” that aren’t shared in the media. It is the front line of hell, he says.
On Oct. 17, he wrote: “Come see how cruelly everyone was murdered here. There is almost no corpse that hasn’t been abused.”
For Mondoweiss to point to Shmuel’s Oct. 8 post as evidence he did not see atrocities — bodies, burned bodies, naked and splayed bodies, or anything else — is plainly dishonest.
Part Three of this series will appear tomorrow.
Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA, the foremost media watchdog organization focused on coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Rape Deniers: Evidence of Hamas Sexual Assault Ignored Despite Proof (Part Two) first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Union Antisemitism Running Rampant on College Campuses, Experts and Student Tell US Congress
Illustrative: Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Experts told the US Congress on Tuesday that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), which was represented among the expert witnesses, has spoken publicly before about a litany of alleged injustices to which UE officials subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University.
At MIT, the group said in August, “union officers” aided a riotous mob which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee on Tuesday about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.
“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,’” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”
Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.
“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Kyle Koeppel Mann, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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German Police Arrest 5 Anti-Israel Activists After Break-In, Vandalism Targeting Elbit Systems
Demonstrators attend the “Lift the Ban” rally organized by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Authorities in Germany on Monday arrested five activists linked to the anti-Israel network Palestine Action after the group broke into an Elbit Systems building in the southern city of Ulm, vandalizing the facility with red paint, smoke bombs, graffiti, and smashed windows before occupying an upper floor in an effort to oppose the Jewish state’s war to dismantle the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The officers who responded surrounded the building and apprehended the suspects. The state’s Security and Counterterrorism Center then took over the investigation.
Video posted by Palestine Action showed masked figures hurling paint, breaking through doors, and damaging equipment inside the facility owned by the Israeli defense contractor, which the activist group and recently proscribed terrorist organization has regularly targeted. The vandals claimed they had sought “to dismantle the tools used to commit genocide in Gaza.”
Elbit released a statement condemning the crime.
“Elbit Systems Deutschland GmbH is a German company and has been a reliable partner of the Bundeswehr for many years in protecting democracy and freedom in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal acts of destruction and vandalism committed at our site over the weekend,” the defense firm stated. “It is unacceptable that violent groups, presumably under the influence of foreign agitators, are repeatedly attempting to disrupt production processes in Ulm, seeking to endanger employees and to instill fear.”
The company added that “we have been an attractive employer and a driver of technical innovation in the Ulm region for decades, and we trust in the support of the authorities in quickly solving the latest crimes and restoring the status quo. The company is working that production of systems for the German Armed Forces at the Ulm plant will resume shortly.”
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, labeled the attack on Elbit an act of terrorism.
“In Ulm, the branch of an Israeli company was attacked by masked perpetrators — presumably motivated by left-extremist, Israel-hostile intent,” he wrote on X. “While Hamas supporters smash windows here, terrorists in Jerusalem murder 6 civilians in a brutal attack on a bus. Anyone who attacks Israel — whether with words, deeds, or weapons — simultaneously assaults our shared security and our values. Antisemitism and terror must have no place in Germany. These attacks are terrorist acts — they must be clearly named and harshly punished.”
Prosor was referring to a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Monday in which Hamas terrorists opened fire on a bus, murdering six Israelis and injuring several more.
The break-in is the latest in a concerted campaign of vandalism and intimidation carried out by Palestine Action across Europe. Founded in the UK in 2020, the group has specialized in spectacular stunts and property destruction aimed at shutting down Elbit facilities and other companies the group regards as complicit in an alleged genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its activists have smashed factory windows, chained themselves to gates, poured red paint over equipment, and even attacked military planes at a Royal Air Force base.
The UK regards Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. On Sunday, police announced the arrests of almost 900 at a demonstration organized in support of the group. Charges included 857 alleged to support a banned extremist entity and 17 alleged assaults.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart said of the event that “the violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people … intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”
James “Fergie” Chambers, an American heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, pays the legal fees of arrested Palestine Action members. He once wrote online, “I chant death to America every day” and that “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.”
Richard Barnard, a co-founder of the UK-designated terrorist group, is scheduled to face trial next year on “one count of inviting support for a proscribed organization, namely Hamas, under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act and two counts of encouraging ‘criminal damage’ against Israeli weapons factories under s44 of the Serious Crime Act.”
Barnard stated in a June 2024 interview that he had previously broken into US Air Force bases in Germany. In October 2023, he said that “when we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood [Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel], we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.”
Huda Ammori, another co-founder of Palestine Action, also expressed her enthusiasm for the mass slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Zionists spend 75 years stealing Palestinian land but fails [sic] to take away the Palestinian determination for liberation. Palestine will be free!” Ammori wrote on the day of the attack. “If armed thugs stormed your home, forced you and your family to live in the garage, routinely beat you and starved you. Would you fight back? #FreePalestine.”
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‘End Hate’: Major New Campaign Targets Antisemitism in K-12 Schools
Pro-Hamas activists calling themselves the United Front for Liberation lead march through Valley Plaza Mall. The ‘Ceasefire’ rally began at Wilson Park in Bakersfield, California, on Dec. 16, 2023. Photo: Jacob Lee Green via REUTERS CONNECT
EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism on Tuesday, launching its new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement on Tuesday. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Creeping antisemitism in public education is a growing problem, as The Algemeiner has reported previously. In June, for example, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) raised alarms when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents obtained by The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Another module reviewed by The Algemeiner contains a question based on a May 15, 1948, statement from The Arab League — a group of countries which adamantly opposed Jewish immigration to the region in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel and refused to condemn antisemitic violence Arabs perpetrated against Jewish refugees — after Israel declared its independence. The passage denies that Jews faced antisemitic indignities when the land was administered by the Ottoman Empire, a notion that is inconsistent with the historical record, and asserts that “Arab inhabitants” are “the lawful owners of the country.”
Following the passage, students are asked to agree with its content as a prerequisite for proceeding to the next module. That means selecting as the correct answer the choice which says “the creation of Israel failed to consider Arab interests.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday, Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of EJH and The Lawfare Project, a partner organization, said the Wissahickon case highlights the degree to which antisemitism and anti-Israel bias has planted itself in public schools.
“What we’re seeing in colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization in schooling, in reality, starts much earlier,” Filitti said. “We’re seeing lesson plans which push the idea that Israel is a genocidal state, or that it is an illegitimate state. We see faculty and administrators who do not support Zionist identity and reject that it can be the basis of discriminatory hate.”
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” he added. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The problem has taken hold in private schools as well, according to a recent Anti-Defamation Leage (ADL) survey.
Among surveyed school parents, 25.2 percent said their children had experienced or witnessed antisemitic symbols in school since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the data showed. Perhaps more striking, 45.3 percent of surveyed parents reported that their children had experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and 31.7 percent said their children had “experienced or witnessed problematic school curricula or classroom content related to Jews or Israel.”
Parents are displeased with schools’ handling of the issue, the ADL said. Focus groups told its experts that schools decline to denounce antisemitism or resort to denying altogether that it is fostering a negative learning environment which causes student discomfort and precipitous declines in academic performance. In a poll, over a third of parents have said their local school’s response “was either somewhat or very inadequate.”
Moreover, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which were purportedly meant to improve race relations, abstain from recognizing antisemitism as a form of hatred meriting a focused response from administrators. The Algemeiner has previously reported that many of those programs also ignore antisemitism because they actively contribute to spreading it. Due to this, schools often lack authority figures who understand antisemitism, its subtle and overt variations, leaving Jewish students with no recourse when they become victims of hate.
“These independent schools are failing to support Jewish families. By tolerating — or in some cases, propagating — antisemitism in their classrooms, too many independent schools in cities across the country are sending a message that Jewish students are not welcome. It’s wrong. It’s hateful. And it must stop,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement at the time. “ADL is partnering with parents to demand change.”
ADL vice president of advocacy, Shira Goodman, added: “School administrators and faculty have a duty to ensure safe, inclusive environments for all. ADL will fully invest in bolstering the families who are demanding that their schools meet this obligation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.