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Nepotism or Normal?
The Titanic at the docks of Southampton. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – Isn’t it ironic that in our own advanced, enlightened and progressive generation, more murder and mayhem is going on around the world than in ancient and primitive times? Chaos and anarchy reign while wars and terror hotspots dot the global landscape. Are sophisticated moderns really more vicious and violent than the cavemen of old? That’s for another discussion, but it is a sad irony indeed.
Alas, Cowboys and Indians and war movies have nothing on the TV news we watch on our screens daily. Just the other day, 38-year-old Gidon Peri was murdered by a Palestinian who attacked him with a hammer to his head.
Beyond the immediate danger zones lies the risk that we who may be somewhat removed from the battlefields may well become desensitized by the non-stop feed of terror, stabbings and massacres. Our brains are bombarded continuously with wars, murder and violence. There is a very real concern that the constancy of it may well leave us unmoved, inured and almost immunized to bloodshed. We see so much of it regularly that it becomes commonplace and “normal”; our feelings of compassion and sensitivity may be weakening.
We need to reaffirm our abhorrence of violence. We remain a peace-loving people, despite the IDF’s military prowess and our heroic soldiers’ courageous tenacity and commitment to protecting our land and its people.
Over 3,000 years ago, the Jews taught the world about the sanctity of human life. The Ten Commandments and our moral code formed the basis and culture of numerous societies. But there are still too many who deny the sanctity of life and worship death. We taught the value of life to the world, and they have become a death cult, glorifying the ghastly. Is it conceivable in our wildest imaginations that IDF soldiers, or any Jews, would or could have perpetrated a bloodthirsty massacre like Oct. 7? The grisly savagery was so mind-boggling that I struggle to look at the photos.
It is therefore paramount that we, the moral community, exercise the utmost vigilance to maintain our own sensitivity in the face of the visual onslaughts we are exposed to daily.
This brings me to the cynical accusations leveled against us that we Jews do not feel compassion for others. They say we “only care for our own” and do not actually extend our compassion to other people. We don’t care about the innocent men, women and children in Gaza. We only care for our own.
Well, this is but one of the many Big Lies that Jews have had to contend with over the ages. Like all of them, it is wrong, unjustified and utterly absurd. In fact, I can quite easily argue and demonstrate that Jews care more for others than those “others” care for their own. Golda Meir’s famous line comes to mind immediately: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate ours.” How true this remains to this day. Hamas gleefully trains children to become suicide bombers. Little children with machine guns and suicide vests are pictured regularly in their propaganda. This is their “nachas.”
As for Jewish tradition, the Talmud teaches: “We support the non-Jewish poor together with the Jewish poor.” Indeed, we have done so forever. Any objective observer will see it empirically, too.
I remember some years ago meeting the head of the United Jewish Communities of New York when he was here on a visit to South Africa. He told me how proud he was that he managed to persuade a Jewish donor in Manhattan to donate $1 million to Israel. But his pride was shattered when the next morning he read in the New York Times that the very same fellow had just donated $9 million to Columbia University (we won’t discuss Colombia University’s behavior after Oct. 7).
How many American universities, hospitals and other community centers have been supported with massive donations, sponsorships and endowments by Jewish donors? The list is endless.
Then there’s the other guilt-inducing practice that when we hear a tragedy has occurred, G-d forbid, we ask, “Were any Jews involved?” Do we only care about our own? Is it morally correct to even ask that question?
So, please allow me to assuage your guilt.
Let’s imagine you were on the Titanic. You managed to get into a lifeboat and there are people’s heads bobbing up in the water. You can’t possibly save them all from drowning. Then you see your own brother in the water. Would you say it was immoral to offer your brother your outstretched hand first before saving a stranger? Or is that, in fact, the morally correct thing to do?
Is there a moral dilemma here? In my humble opinion: no, not at all.
Charity begins at home. True, we mustn’t only give to our family. We are expected to extend our charity beyond our family to our community, in ever-widening circles if we can. But family does come first. That is a completely correct and appropriate moral duty and obligation.
We Jews are all family. We are sons and daughters of our founding patriarchs and matriarchs, and brothers and sisters literally, traditionally and emotionally. We help the world big time. But we need make no apologies whatsoever for helping our family first.
We fully accept responsibility to help causes beyond our own, but our first obligation is surely to our own brothers and sisters. For this, we have no regrets and no explanations should be necessary.
I am not at all impressed by the world agencies whose job it is to help countries and communities in need. They who claim to be “equal” in their distribution of charity and care to the needy seem to be rather discriminating when it comes to Israel and Jews. When you care “equally” about everyone, it seems you may well end up caring about no one.
So we, Israel and the Jewish people, will continue to be the most moral nation on earth. We shall carry on looking after our own and the rest of the world too.
The post Nepotism or Normal? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Student Intifada Escalates at the University of Washington
ILLUSTRATIVE: Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, U.S., February 5, 2025. (There is no indication any of these students are members of SUPER UW — the group referenced in this article.) REUTERS/David Ryder
A suspended student group is supporting an organization that the United States and Canada have deemed a terrorist entity, taking over an engineering building at the University of Washington.
Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at the University of Washington (SUPER UW) was suspended from campus after refusing to cooperate with university administrators who were investigating vandalism after demonstrations in 2024. However, that suspension seems to be in name only, as SUPER UW has been allowed to hold tabling events on campus, with some reportedly handing out Hamas’ pamphlets (according to a Canary Mission video) and selling t-shirts promoting “resistance.”
On May 5, SUPER UW published a manifesto stating, “WE DEMAND: UW will no longer be complicit in genocide.” SUPER UW explained they were answering “the call” and entered “a new global phase of repression and resistance, both in the international student movement and on the ground in Palestine.” It is even more concerning who may have issued the call.
In May 2024 Samidoun published “A call from the Palestinian student movement in Gaza: Time for revolutionary escalation of the global intifada.” Samidoun is not limiting their call to university students but is also calling for high school students to participate in the “global intifada.” This is another example of university campus influence on K-12 education, demonstrating the need for transparency, not only in higher education, but in K-12 schools.
“Today we turn to high school students all over the world to participate widely in the struggles and activities of the university student movement, organizing demonstrations, sit-ins, and vigils, writing petitions and letters, and organizing educational days about the Palestinian struggle and the goals of the Palestinian people for liberation and return. Secondary schools constitute a strong fortress and a great support for university students everywhere,” the statement said.
SUPER UW explicitly supports Samidoun, issuing a “Solidarity Statement with Samidoun Against Ongoing Repression” after the terrorist designation by the governments of Canada and the United States.
More recently, SUPER UW shared their desire to “build a revolutionary culture in the West, bridging the Palestinian resistance back home and the Palestinian solidarity movement here in the imperial core to contribute to the global Camp of Resistance.” After the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim by a man yelling “free, free Palestine” — and after the fire-bombing of American Jews marching for the return of Israeli hostages in Colorado — SUPER UW’s call to “build a revolutionary culture” in the United States could be seen as a call for more violence against Jews and other Americans.
During a February 2025 rally organized by SUPER UW, the group’s media liaison admitted, “Our fight was never about the ceasefire, the fight is for a single Palestinian state, from the river to the sea.” The suspended group was protesting the Boeing-UW partnership on the construction of the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building on the university campus.
The response to a suspended campus group organizing a demonstration on campus was lackluster. UWPD Chief Craig Wilson stated, “We welcome and honor everybody’s freedom of speech, and we are here to support that. As long as people don’t violate either university rules and regulations or state law, we’re here to support everybody’s first amendment right to have freedom of speech.”
It should not be surprising that the University of Washington has been occupied by rioters and arsonists. The UW administration has ceded responsibility by allowing SUPER UW to continue to operate on campus, after being suspended.
According to a Forbes article published in 2023, UW receives approximately $1.56 billion Federal dollars for research and development. An institution that receives that type of Federal investment should do everything in its lawful power to ensure that groups are not handing out terrorist propaganda on campus.
The US Department of Education should require detailed disclosures on funding for departments, professors, centers, and student groups, including line-item reporting on how those funds are used.
Brandy Shufutinsky is the director of Education and National Security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which examines the threats and vulnerabilities within America’s education system. Follow Brandy on X @76brandy76. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
The post The Student Intifada Escalates at the University of Washington first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Only Pro-Israel Argument That Works
A room full of Torah scrolls in Miami. Photo: Pini Dunner.
Baruch Hashem, this is the only pro-Israel argument that works:
There is a Creator
Who made the universe,
And gave a slice of it to the Children of Israel,
As an everlasting inheritance.
This is how every Jew should begin their conversations about Israel, because this is how Judaism’s most sacred text begins her magnum opus. (And check out the very first Rashi commentary on the very first verse of the very first chapter of the Five Books of Moses).
Indeed, it is specifically the Torah that records the name “Zion” 154 times, “Jerusalem” 669 times, and “Israel” 2,319 times. And it does so not with a pandering, insecure Zionism of recent man-made construction — but with an unstoppable, proud 4,000-year-old territorial right of an eternal people, gifted with an eternal land, by an Eternal G-d.
And yet our enemies — terrorists and terrorist sanitizers around the globe — all have the same criminal solution to the Jewish problem. To use politics, economics, and downright violence to steal an indigenous land from her indigenous people, Israel from the Children of Israel.
But there exists no one — not a single man nor a group of people — who has the right to trade, barter, occupy, or negotiate away a homeland that is the birthright of every single Jew — no matter who, no matter where, no matter when.
Paper mandates are worth less than the paper they were written on.
Ceasefires enable the fires of terrorism to never cease.
And dangerous idiots on college campuses, in the hallowed halls of government, and in anti-Jewish hate mobs everywhere refuse to answer one simple question: Where does the name “Jew” come from?
Once again, the answer comes from the Torah. From the “Kingdom of Judea” — the tribe of King David — the geographical origin point of all the Jews you know today.
As desperately as the propaganda pundits try to poison your brain, we are not “West Bankers” from the “West Bank.” We are Judeans from Judea and Samaria. Our indigenous right to our homeland is embedded in our very name itself. And no matter what lies the media tries to force down your brain, it’s impossible for us to “occupy” our own land.
It is the only land of the Jewish people.
Always has. Always will be.
And whoever gives up an inch of it is robbing the Jewish Nation.
And yet, since the destruction of our Holy Temple in Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago by the Roman Occupation of Israel, their subsequent iterations have raped, pillaged, murdered, pogromed, crusaded, inquisitioned, holocausted, and tried to wipe us off the face of the earth and make us forget our Judean identity.
But they have gloriously failed.
As Mark Twain declared in 1899, “The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
The secret is simple.
It is the Torah.
The Torah is the secret to our immortality.
As the Talmud states, we are like fish in water. And no matter what the clever foxes of time whisper to us through their shiny teeth, our only way to survive is to stay in the “waters of Torah.” This is what Rabbi Akiva told Pappus Ben Judah in the time of the Roman Occupation of Israel. This is what our people’s leaders have told us throughout all the hard times since then. And this is what the Lubavitcher Rebbe has told us in our own time.
Torah isn’t just how we survive.
It’s how we thrive.
Why is this?
Because the Torah is not some history book or even a collection of religious rituals. It is a sacred book of Divine lessons, the ultimate frame-changer for all humanity. And it is exactly what we need more of right now.
So pick up a Torah book, download a Torah podcast, join a Torah class or simply call your rabbi.
The chapters of history don’t lie. We are the indigenous natives of Israel and we must always be proud of that immutable, immortal truth.
This is why the Shulchan Aruch opens her magnum opus of Jewish law with the teaching of the Talmudic scholar Yehudah ben Teima, who said, “Be as bold as a leopard … to do the will of your Father in Heaven.” The very first step of our legal system, of the pathway to justice and spiritual development, is the simple fact that it is only the proud Jew who studies Torah and cherishes her Mitzvot who passes on an unbreakable and undeniable Jewish identity to our children’s children’s children — and ensures we stand strong against all oppression and persecution, as demanded by our Torah.
Levi Y. Welton is a rabbi, stand-up comedian, and Lubavitcher Chossid. He can be reached at rabbiwelton@gmail.com
The post The Only Pro-Israel Argument That Works first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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No Antisemitism Here: How the Media Distorted the Boulder, Colorado Attack
A Boulder police officer patrols with a bomb smelling dog beside a makeshift memorial outside the Boulder Courthouse, days after an attack that injured multiple people in Boulder, Colorado, US, June 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mark Makela
It was a tragically straightforward story: Eight people were injured on Sunday, June 1, when a man yelled “Free Palestine” and threw fire bombs into a crowd of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, where they called for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Media headlines, however, did not mention Jews, nor the antisemitic slogan. They did not even call it an act of terrorism, although this is how the FBI labeled it.
For many media outlets, Jews being set on fire was merely an attack like any other. And this is precisely the narrative that enables the very antisemitism they failed to report on.
Jews were firebombed in Boulder because they dared to rally for Israeli hostages.
But here’s how the media covered it.pic.twitter.com/XA2Vzm9za9
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 3, 2025
The BBC‘s headline, for example, is about “the attack in Colorado” — too vague to know who attacked whom and why:
The AP’s headline took an extra step, acknowledging the existence of “suspect” and “victims” — as in any attack — but failing to identify them:
The headlines from NPR and Newsweek were equally bad, saying that random “people” were burned with no mention of their identity or the perpetrator’s antisemitic motive:
And an editor at CBS News thought it was more important to mention the full name of the Boulder Pearl Street Mall in the headline, rather than the identity of the victims:
Some of the worst headlines came from ABC News and ABC Australia, which questioned the entire event by using scare quotes around words like “terror” and “flamethrower”:
The AP went further, actively shilling for the attacker, Mohammed Soliman, who “appeared to have second thoughts” and threw only two out of 18 Molotov Cocktails:
“Mohamed Sabry Soliman had 18 Molotov cocktails but threw just two,” reports @AP.
That’s what AP believes is having “second thoughts.”
Please forgive the Jewish community if it doesn’t feel grateful or sympathetic towards the perpetrator like AP seems to. pic.twitter.com/f07zvOpSm7
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 3, 2025
There is no excuse for such bad journalism. This isn’t Gaza, where Hamas controls the narrative. And the perpetrator himself declared he wanted to “end Zionists!”
The appropriate headline should have been simple: “Pro-Palestinian attacks Jews supporting Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado,” or “Eight Jews burned after pro-Palestinian attacker targets solidarity march with Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.”
So why were media outlets unable to accurately report it?
The only answer, other than incompetence, is complicity: Hiding the fact that Jews were deliberately set on fire legitimizes their targeting.
Because it’s antisemitic to cover for antisemites.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post No Antisemitism Here: How the Media Distorted the Boulder, Colorado Attack first appeared on Algemeiner.com.