US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) lambasted several major airlines over pausing routes to Israel, suggesting that they have launched a silent boycott of the Jewish state. 

“I am calling upon the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta, and United to end the unilateral + indefinite suspensions of air travel to Israel. The operative words here are ‘unilateral’ and ‘indefinite,’” Torres wrote on X/Twitter on Thursday.

“Air travel suspensions should have time limits and FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] approval. Instead of following the FAA, the three airlines have been acting on their own to suspend flights to Israel.  These suspensions are so indefinite as to be indistinguishable from a boycott,” Torres continued. 

Torres penned a letter to CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines to “express concern about the suspension of air travel between the United States and Israel.”

The letter was first obtained by Jewish Insider. 

Torres wrote that the “prolonged” and “pervasive” suspension of flights to Israel has made travel to the Jewish state “less affordable.” Israel’s national airline El Al has become the sole air carrier to the Jewish state, becoming “a de facto monopoly,” Torres wrote. 

The congressman took aim at American Airlines over its decision to “unilaterally suspend air travel indefinitely until mid-2025,” arguing it is tantamount to “effectively boycotting or otherwise discriminating against the world’s only Jewish state.”

Torres suggested that several major American airlines may have succumbed to pressure from the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) — an initiative which calls on organizations and corporations to cut financial ties with the Jewish state as the first step toward its eventual destruction. 

“Given the arbitrary length of the suspension, one could be forgiven for thinking that the BDS movement had taken over the American aviation industry without anyone noticing, much less crying foul,” Torres wrote.

Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundations for Defense of Democracies, also questioned why United Airlines has not chartered trips to the Jewish state despite offering flights “right across Israel on the way to Dubai from Newark.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum, praised Torres’s letter on X/Twitter.

“He’s absolutely right!” Ostrovsky posted.

Torres, a self-described progressive, has established himself as a stalwart ally of the Jewish state, especially in the months following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1,200 people across southern Israel on Oct. 7. Torres has repeatedly defended Israel from unsubstantiated claims of committing “genocide” in Gaza. He has also consistently supported the shipment of American arms to help the Jewish state defend itself from Hamas terrorists. Torres has levied sharp criticism toward university administrators for allowing Jewish students to be threatened on campus without consequence.

The post Ritchie Torres Blasts Airlines for ‘Effectively Boycotting’ Israel, Calls for Resumption of Routes to Jewish State first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A major Israeli shipping company is experiencing a surge in profits for a surprising reason: Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea.

ZIM Integrated Shipping Services, which has been traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2021, achieved a 48 percent year-over-year revenue increase in the second quarter of this year to $1.93 billion.

And it’s not just revenue that has increased. Its net income rose to $373 million and its carry volume has risen 11 percent.

This all occurred amid rising tensions in the Middle East that began after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia, a US-designated terrorist organization, began disrupting global trade with its attacks on shipping in the busy Red Sea corridor after Hamas’s onslaught, arguing its aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza.

The Houthi rebels — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — have controlled a significant portion of Yemen’s land along the Red Sea since 2014, when it captured it in the midst of the country’s civil war.

The Iran-backed movement has said it will target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they do not pass through the Red Sea, and claimed responsibility for attempted drone and missile strikes targeting Israel. Since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, which launched the ongoing war in Gaza, Houthi terrorists in Yemen have routinely launched ballistic missiles towards Israel’s southern city of Eilat. In July, they hit the center of Tel Aviv with a long-range Iranian-made drone.

These attacks primarily in the Red Sea, a key trade route, disrupted global shipping, raising the cost of shipping and insurance and having a major economic impact. Shipping firms have been forced in many cases to re-route to longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa to avoid passing near Yemen.

However, ZIM’s increased revenue and profit appeared to have come because of these attacks, not in spite of them.

It was not just ZIM that experienced rising profits. According to Middle East Eye, “shares of Maersk, the Danish shipping giant operating more than 700 vessels, are up about 20 percent in the last month, while German company Hapag-Lloy — the world’s fifth-largest container shipping group — is up 17 percent.”

The reason they are making more revenue is ironically that they are taking alternative, longer routes, in order to avoid the Red Sea. The issue is that these alternative routes require additional fuel — which cost extra money. These additional costs are passed onto consumers, resulting in greater revenue.

However, the costs passed onto consumers are usually greater than the additional costs that the companies bear due to the longer routes. As a result, they are not just making extra revenue, but extra profit as well.

Observers have noted that these higher prices — which go beyond just the additional prices of fuel, for example — may be justified by pointing out that shipping has become increasingly risky, and so consumers ought to pay higher prices when companies are taking on greater risk.

Since the attacks began, the Houthis have damaged at least 30 ships. At least two cargo ships — one UK-owned and one Greek-owned — have been sunk.

Iran itself has also attacked ships. In April, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized what it claimed to be an “Israeli-linked” ship near the Strait of Hormuz and, in November, Iran attacked an Israeli ship with drones in the Indian Ocean, according to the US.

As for the Houthis, they have threatened and in some cases actually attacked US and British ships, leading the two Western allies to launch retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.

The post Israeli Shipping Company Sees Soaring Profits Because — Not in Spite — of Houthi Red Sea Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Two Stanford University professors have publicly called for reforming “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs in higher education, arguing that they foster racial tension and contribute to antisemitism on college campuses.

“Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development,” Paul Brest — professor emeritus at Stanford Law School — and Emily Levine — who teaches history and education at the university — wrote in an op-ed published by The New York Times. “Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.”

Throughout the piece, Brest and Levine, both of whom served on Stanford’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israel bias, described the way in which DEI’s promotion of identitarianism — a concept which reduces individual identity to racial origin — has in their view promoted flagrantly wrong theories of race whose logical conclusion is conspiracies of Jewish power and control, as well as antisemitic discrimination. As an example, they cited a Stanford DEI training program which prompted a federal civil rights complaint in 2021, a story The Algemeiner covered extensively.

Those programs, argued the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which filed the complaint, “endorsed the narrative that Jews are connected to white supremacy” and promoted “antisemitic tropes concerning Jewish power, conspiracy, and control.” It also excluded Jewish history and antisemitism from conversations about bigotry and racism.

What most outraged the Jewish community, however, was the program’s forcing Jewish mental health clinicians to join “segregated ‘whiteness accountability’ affinity [groups], created for ‘staff who hold privilege via white identity’ and ‘are white identified … or are perceived as white presenting or passing,’” a notion which, in addition to unfairly characterizing whites and institutionalizing racial segregation, does not describe the majority of the world’s Jewish population, many of whom are of color.

“I was placed in the white affinity group based on the idea that I can hide behind my white identity … and I was very disturbed by this because my parents survived World War II in the UK, which ended 11 years before I was born, and people like us were murdered because we were seen as contaminants to the white race. Not only did that feel like a betrayal to my heritage but to my parents,” Stanford employee Sheila Levin told The Algemeiner in 2021.

Brest and Levine believe that DEI can, if reformed, avoid similar offenses by dismantling its racialism and embracing a “pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.”

They continued, “At the core of pluralistic approaches are facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs, and political ideologies but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power privilege, and oppression. Students are taught the complementary skills of telling stories about their own identities, values, and experiences and listening with curiosity and interest to the stories of others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Stanford Professors Call for Reform of DEI, Argue Such Programs Foster Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.