Like ships passing in the night, the Associated Press’ recent account of Houthi attacks on international commercial vessels skirts around the reality of the far-reaching, destructive, and sometimes deadly nautical attacks.

Thus, in her Aug. 7 article, rookie AP reporter Fatma Khaled reports (“Egypt’s currency edges higher against the US dollar after price hikes“) — “Houthis have been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea in retaliation against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.”

Yet, most of the commercial ships that the Houthis have targeted lack any connection to Israel. As the AP itself has written on numerous occasions, including just two days earlier following an attack on a Liberian-flagged ship (“Missile attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels hits container ship in first attack in 2 weeks“):

The Houthis maintain that their attacks target ships linked to Israel, the United States or Britain as part of the rebels’ campaign they say seeks to force an end to the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the war — including some bound for Iran.

Therefore, Khaled’s spin that the Houthi’s nautical attacks are “retaliation” for Israel’s war against Hamas is hardly above board.

The AP’s journalism is also adrift in its Gaza coverage in recent days, unmoored from immutable facts. Thus, in his Aug. 7 article, “Hamas names Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, as its new leader in show of defiance,” Bassem Mroue refers to the slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a “relative moderate.”

This “relative moderate” is the same man whose record includes the following “relatively reasonable” sentiments, compiled by Palestinian Media Watch:

Consistent standards likewise fail to provide a much needed anchor for the AP’s untethered reporting. Thus, Mroue accepts Hamas’ highly questionable fatality figures at face value, without even supplying any attribution.

“The death toll among Palestinians is now nearing 40,000,” he writes, despite AP’s own earlier analysis indicating serious credibility problems with casualty figures provided by the terror organization.

And, then, despite last October’s Al-Ahli hospital fiasco in which Hamas falsely grossly inflated the number of fatalities and blamed them on an Israeli airstrike when in fact a failed Palestinian rocket was the culprit, the AP again hurried to report Hamas’ contested fatality figures in a high profile deadly incident.

In “Israeli airstrike on a Gaza school used as a shelter kills at least 80, Palestinian officials say,” Wafaa Shurafa and Samy Magdy (last updated Aug. 11, 1:13 am GMT) provide this skewed report:

An Israeli airstrike hit a school-turned-shelter in Gaza early Saturday, killing at least 80 people and wounding nearly 50 others, Palestinian health authorities said.

Only three paragraphs later, does the AP inform readers:

The Israeli military acknowledged it targeted the Tabeen school in central Gaza City, saying it hit a Hamas command center in a mosque in its compound and killed 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. Izzat al-Rishq, a top Hamas official, denied there were militants in the school.

While it took the AP three paragraphs before reaching Israel’s refutation of Hamas’ claims accusing Israel of at least 80 civilian deaths, it took exactly one sentence to loop back to Hamas, with its denial of Israel’s information that the army had targeted Hamas combatants using the educational facility as a terror command center.

Moreover, the AP writers devote multiple paragraphs to claims that the victims were uninvolved civilians. Yet, at no point did they recount that the Israeli military provided the names and titles of the 19 Hamas fighters it said were killed in the school — a list that later grew to 38. These details directly call into question the credibility of al-Rishq’s denial that there were militants in the school.

Today, the IDF and ISA struck terrorists operating in a Hamas command and control center, which was embedded inside a mosque in the Al-Taba’een school compound. Following an intelligence investigation, it can be confirmed at this time that at least 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad… pic.twitter.com/97fw1Q9cHy

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 10, 2024

The post The Associated Press Doubts Israel, But Believes the Houthis and Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has issued a statement in support of academic boycotts, a seismic decision which reverses decades of policy and clears the way for scholar activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.

“We … recognize that the committee’s position opposing academic boycotts has been controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom,” the organization said in a statement issued on Monday. “When faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights. In such contexts, academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

Coming amid a bitter debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses and Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, the statement does not mention the Jewish State specifically. However, its countenancing the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — whose proponents believe that expelling Zionism from major cultural institutions is a first step toward Israel’s destruction — is clear, higher education watchdog AMCHA Initiative said on Monday.

“The AAUP’s decision to green-light academic BDS and reverse a decades-long policy opposing it is not just a catastrophe for Jewish student and faculty, but for the future of higher education in America,” it said. “By giving license to an academic boycott that encourages faculty to replace genuine scholarship with political activism whose express goal is to destroy the Jewish state and rid US campuses of Zionism and Zionists, the organization that has been setting the standards on academic freedom since 1915 just made a mockery of every single one of its own standards and is unleashing a tsunami of academic antisemitism that will echo the darkest chapters of Jewish history.”

Another higher education group, Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement (FAAM) described the AAUP’s decision as “wrong,” arguing that “academic boycotts contradict core principles of our higher education system — open inquiry, unfettered intellectual exchange, and academic freedom. And they are a core tactic of the BDS movement.”

Founded in 1915 by John Dewey and Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, the AAUP comprises over 370,000 members from higher education institutions across the US. Once regarded as a guardrail preventing the politicization of higher education, it has in recent years been disparaged — by nonprofits such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), for example —  for allegedly becoming a partisan advocacy group for the far left.

Following Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, two and a half weeks passed before the AAUP commented on the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and when it did, the group said nothing about the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities, instead discussing the importance of academic freedom. At the time, dozens of professors were denounced for cheering Hamas’ violence and encouraging extreme anti-Zionist demonstrations in which masses of students and faculty called for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” which is widely considered a call for genocide.

On Tuesday, Peter Wood, author and president of the National Association of Scholars, told The Algemeiner that it was once “indisputably true” that the AAUP was a “leading champion of academic freedom.” However, he added, with its latest statement the organization “finally crossed the line into outright political action — action that reversed one of the AAUP’s long-standing commitments to academic freedom in favor of academic coercion.”

He continued, “The AAUP’s ‘Statement on Academic Boycotts’ should be seen as another benchmark in the progress of academic antisemitism. The AAUP appears to be ready to abandon more than a hundred years of advocating for principled neutrality among faculty to lurch into support for academic boycotts. It is, however, a sly statement and employs finesse to advance its dubious cause … The campus is a special place, set aside for free intellectual inquiry, and in no way suited to the dynamics of mass conformity. By opening the door to academic boycotts, the AAUP undermines academic freedom. And by opening that door right now, it offers cover to the antisemites who are using BDS as one of their covers for their campaign to destroy Israel.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post ‘Catastrophe for Jewish Students’: Historic Body of University Professors Approves Academic Boycotts first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Actress Rachel Zegler declared her support for a “Free Palestine” this week while promoting her new film, the live-action remake of the 1937 Disney classic “Snow White” that also stars Israeli actress Gal Gadot in the role of the Evil Queen.

Despite the fact that Zegler’s leading co-star in the film is a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces and an avid supporter of her home country, the Golden Globe-winning actress — who will also star in a new Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — did not hesitate to publicly share her support for the Palestinian cause.

Three days after the trailer for the new “Snow White” film was released, and has since racked up over 6 million views on YouTube, Zegler tweeted on Monday, “i love you all so much! thank you for the love and for 120m views on our trailer in just 24 hours! what a whirlwind. i am in the thick of rehearsals for romeo + juliet so i’m gonna get outta here. bye for now [sic].”

In a separate post, she added: “and always remember, free palestine [sic].”

Zegler’s pro-Palestinian tweet has garnered 5.5 million views and almost 50,000 shares since being posted. The post on X has also attracted hundreds of comments from pro-Israel supporters, who criticized the tweet as well as Zegler’s “backstabbing” and lack of support for her Israeli co-star. Some social media users asked Zegler if she had the audacity to say “Free Palestine” to Gadot’s face while others chastised the Walt Disney Company for even hiring Zegler to play the title character in the upcoming “Snow White” film.

“Free Disney of Rachel Zegler,” said one social media user. Another wrote to Zegler, “If you mean free from Hamas, I agree.”

“Good to know you share the same ideology as the man who tried to murder a Jew in NY. He screamed free palestine when he stabbed a Jew,” an X user wrote in response to Zegler’s tweet. Another added, “Hey, ‘Snow White’, it must be tough to be outshined by the beauty of Wonder Woman, while being so much uglier inside.” One X user sarcastically said, “Wow you’re such a ‘team player’. Way to support your cast mate.”

A user on X that drew attention to Disney tweeted: “Disney have [sic] an interesting marketing strategy for Snow White. It co-stars Israeli Gal Gadot, making sure Israel-haters will boycott it, and Israel-hater Rachel Zegler, making sure pro-Israelis will be loathe to watch it. Is there some way to alienate neutral viewers too?”

Gadot has not directly responded to Zegler’s tweet, but on Tuesday, she shared on her Instagram Story a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Gadot added, “Only love can truly save the world.”

The post ‘Snow White’ Star Rachel Zegler Declares ‘Free Palestine’ While Promoting Film Also Starring Gal Gadot first appeared on Algemeiner.com.