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Expert on Oct. 7 Terrorist Attack Notes the One Positive Outcome of the Hamas Massacre

Some of the thousands of people who gathered in New York City’s Central Park on Oct. 6, 2024, to mark the one year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack and to demand the return of the hostages. Photo: Hostages and Families Forum.

Warning: The following news story contains some details of the atrocities committed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel that readers may find upsetting.

An author, journalist, and former Israeli government spokesperson who extensively investigated the deadly Hamas terrorist attack that took place on Oct. 7 of last year told The Algemeiner that he believes the only “positive” outcome of the massacre across southern Israel is that it made Jews worldwide and the nation of Israel more united.

“I’m not sure if people who don’t live in Israel realize how divided the people of Israel were before Oct. 7,” said Alon Penzel, referring to a time when mass anti-government protests were rampant across Israel for several months. “It felt like we were unable to live together having very different ideological thoughts … And right after Oct. 7, and since Oct. 7, there are no people in the world who are more united than the Jewish and Israeli people.”

“I don’t think there has been any other nation in history that has come together so much to volunteer and help its brothers and sisters,” he added. “And for me, I see [Hamas] have not managed to eliminate and exterminate the Jewish spirit, as they tried to do on Oct. 7 … We are overcoming. We are prevailing … It was a national tragedy, but for each and every one of us — either an Israeli citizen or a Jewish person around the world — it felt like an individual tragedy; a personal tragedy. These faces have become our brothers and sisters.”

The grandson of a Holocaust survivor, Penzel formerly served as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson for the foreign press in the Unit for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). His friend, schoolmate and Kiryat Bialik neighbor Matan Angrest, was abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7 and is one of the 101 hostages still held captive in the Gaza Strip a year later.

In June, Penzel published the book “Testimonies Without Boundaries: Israel: October 7th 2023,” which is an uncensored, unfiltered, and verified collection of first-hand testimonies regarding the atrocities that happened last Oct. 7. Penzel spoke to survivors of the attack – including children and elderly, and women and men who faced sexual abuse – volunteers of the Israeli emergency response organization ZAKA, the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, survivors of the Nova music festival, and many others. The book is dedicated to the victims of Oct. 7 and calls for the immediate release of the remaining hostages taken captive that day.

Among the graphic and difficult-to-read testimonies included in the book, rescue and recovery forces talked to Penzel about finding a completely naked couple tied to a mattress with a metal wire that was inserted into their stomachs. Penzel also documented accounts about children who were murdered using knives and hammers, and civilians who were crucified. “I had to ask difficult, sometimes insensitive questions to get to the bottom of what happened,” Penzel told The Algemeiner. “The conversations might have been challenging, and those interactions are described very genuinely in the book.”

The 50-60 testimonies in the book have all been completely verified by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, as well as women’s organizations that were assigned on behalf of Israel to investigate sexual abuse that took place on Oct. 7. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also distributed the book worldwide to embassies and world leaders.

Penzel told The Algemeiner that the main purpose of his book is to commemorate the testimonies, the families of the victims, the heroes and the survivors of Oct. 7. “These testimonies need to be out, as challenging as they are, and the book is challenging to read, there is no question,” he said. “But if we say ‘this is too hard for us [to read],’ what would those who went through the atrocities say?”

“This is our duty, for the families of the victims and the victims themselves, to make sure that what happened to them is not forgotten and denied,” he added. “I felt the duty to commemorate the atrocities that occurred.”

The author also included only raw, unedited testimonies in his book because he anticipated global denial about the Hamas terrorist attack. “It’s exactly what we experienced with the Holocaust — a worldwide denial,” he said. “And I believe the only way to combat it is with the uncensored, unfiltered testimonies.”

“The purpose from the very beginning was to fight the worldwide denial that I foresaw that we would face very quickly, and unfortunately we are,” he noted. “If people are trying to contradict and refute what we are saying about the atrocities that occurred to us, what’s going to happen 50 years from now if we don’t have all the testimonies, and proofs, and evidence, and the very clear elaborate and specific details of what happened? How are we going to be able to commemorate those brothers and sisters of ours? I think the families of the victims also want the world to know for generations to come what happened to their loved ones.”

Reflecting one year later on the atrocities that took place on Oct. 7, 2023, Penzel said that while Hamas-led terrorists carried out the deadliest attack against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust, they were not able to break the Jewish spirit.

“I feel that although [the terrorists] did manage to infiltrate Israel and murder us and take many of us hostage, the fact that we are prevailing with our spirit is what matters,” he said. “The fact that we able to commemorate our loved ones means that we are prevailing and that we are trying to overcome, while remembering our brothers and sisters who were butchered and slaughtered on Oct. 7.”

Penzel also noted that the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 helped Israeli citizens understand “that unity is more important than any political disagreement.”

“It’s proven. We have come together. We have assisted each other,” he said. “People from all around the world; Jews from all around the world have come to Israel to volunteer. Israelis are volunteering, helping each other, no matter from where they are on the political map, no matter where they have come from ideologically.”

“Obviously I wish [Oct. 7] never happened, but it gave us a wake up call of how important unity is among the people of Israel.”

The post Expert on Oct. 7 Terrorist Attack Notes the One Positive Outcome of the Hamas Massacre first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism

A protester holds a sign that reads, ”From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestinian emergency demonstration outside the Consulate General of Israel in Houston, Texas, on March 19, 2025. Photo: Reginald Mathalone via Reuters Connect

The 2025 Israel Summit in Dallas, Texas has been indefinitely postponed in response to what organizers described as intensifying threats of terrorism. 

Prior to the cancellation, the event was expecting over 1,000 attendees. The Israel Summit had already undergone a last-minute venue change due to mounting safety concerns. The gathering, scheduled for June 9–11, was set to feature prominent voices from both the Jewish and Christian pro-Israel communities.

Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who had been scheduled to speak at the event, commented on the cancellation on social media: “This is what America looks like in 2025. A peaceful pro-Israel gathering with more than a thousand participants had to be scrapped because of threats from violent extremists.”

Ten days prior to this year’s event, local police and intelligence officials in Dallas alerted organizers that the gathering had been upgraded to a “high-threat event.” 

According to Josiah Hilton, host of the Israel Guys show, which was scheduled to co-host the event with HaYovel, the organizers had to produce “a mandatory security plan with a substantial budget estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The organizers then moved the Israel Summit to a facility in an isolated area of Kenneth, Texas. However, the event was forced to cancel after the Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas and Jewish Voice for Peace, a pair of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas organizations, revealed its location to their followers. 

[T]he Genocide Summit had to change plans last minute in desperation due to them claiming to be ‘under attack.’ The reality is they understand DFW’s commitment to confronting the extremist ideology that is Zionism,” Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas wrote on Instagram. 

However, the organizers stated that they are going to hold the pro-Israel event “in the near future,” and vowed to “come back bigger and stronger, with more people.”

Hilton said that the cancellation reflects “the growing normalization of antisemitic threats and anti-Israel extremists, which are fueling intimidation and silencing voices of support for Israel across the United States.”

The cancellation of the Israel Summit also reflects growing concern regarding potential violence against supporters of the Jewish state. Last month, two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lipschinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered while exiting an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Then this past Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people and a dog.

The post Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Anti-Israel Animus, Propaganda Is Leading to Violence Against Jews, Experts Warn

Police officers gather on Pearl Street in front of the Boulder County Courthouse, the scene of an attack that injured multiple people, in Boulder, Colorado, US, June 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mark Makela

Hatred for Israel, often motivated by the spread of misinformation about the Jewish state’s history and conduct in Gaza, is fueling violence against Jews in the US and elsewhere, according to experts who spoke with The Algemeiner.

On Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally with Molotov cocktails and a “makeshift” flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people ranging in age from 25 to 88 in what US authorities called a targeted terrorist attack. Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, was charged on Thursday with attempted murder and a slate of other crimes that could land him in jail for more than 600 years if convicted. Prosecutors say he yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack. The suspect also told investigators that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people,” according to court documents.

The Colorado firebombing came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, also yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supported the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”

Such language targeting “Zionists” and calling to “Free Palestine” is identical to the rhetoric that has been widely uttered by anti-Israel activists on university campuses since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and launched the war in Gaza.

Just two days after the Colorado attack, for example, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), one of the most notorious anti-Israel campus groups, issued a call for its followers to confront a “group of zionists [sic]” at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. It made a similar call to action the day before, charging that Pride Month festivities are “hijacked by Zionist pinkwashing.”

CUAD added, “LGBTQ+ rights can’t be weaponized to erase Palestinian genocide. Homonationalism isn’t freedom — it’s oppression with a rainbow flag. Real pride is standing against settler colonialism.”

The aim of such language, according to experts, is to deny Jewish history and the indigenousness of the Jewish people to the land of Israel while priming listeners to accept the notion that the existence of Israel is an illegitimate, imperialist project necessitating its destruction.

“Being a Zionist is to understand the Jews are a people, and as a people they have a shared ancestral heritage rooted in the land of Israel,” Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told The Algemeiner. “If you’re going to say, ‘No, Israel has no right to exist,’ what you’re doing is asserting that Jews are not a people with no history in the land. Those who are peddling today’s modern antisemitism are rewriting history, both erasing and denying it.”

Prominent media outlets have amplified those who hold such beliefs, Lewin noted, fostering a sense that anti-Jewish hatred is acceptable and even honorable.

“The day before the assassination of [Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, the victims of last month’s DC shooting], you had the blood libel claiming that 14,000 babies were going to be killed in Gaza spread by the United Nations and by several publications — it turned out of course to be completely false,” she explained.

“Just before this incident on Sunday [the Colorado firebombing], news media outlets, including the Washington Post, report that Israelis opened fire on Gazans as they collected humanitarian aid — which is also false, patently,” Lewin continued. “Certainly, you had campus groups spewing this kind of hatred and messaging for years, but now it’s even mainstream media doing so.”

Jonathan Schulman, executive director of the nonprofit group The Jewish Majority, agreed.

“You see a direct link between conspiracy theories and violence against the Jewish community,” he said. “Now we live in a world in which it is normalized to use the most extreme rhetoric against the Jewish community, and to accuse Jews of intentionally starving populations. You see Jews being accused of genocide, and the consequences, as described in a post I saw on [X/Twitter] are clear: Blood libel leads to blood in the streets.”

There have been several examples on university campuses of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel activists using language in an apparent effort to incite action against Zionists, many of which have been previously reported by The Algemeiner.

In November 2024, pro-Hamas activists at the University of California, Santa Barbara graffitied “Zionist not allowed” in an act of intimidation targeted at former student body president Tessa Veksler. In April 2023, months before the Oct. 7 massacre, Michal Cotler, Israel’s special envoy for combatting antisemitism, was greeted with flyers that said, “Zionism out of NYU!” and claimed that “Israel is an apartheid state.” During the 2023-2024 academic year at Stanford University a Jewish student was repeatedly called a “Zionist, Nazi pig.” In February 2025, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called for a “future free of Zionism” following its vandalism of the home of a Jewish member of the UC Board of Regents, the governing body of the University of California system.

Antisemitism in the US is surging to break “all previous annual records,” according to chilling data released in the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in April.

The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents last year — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.

The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.

“This horrifying level of antisemitism should never be accepted and yet, as our data shows, it has become a persistent and grim reality for American Jewish communities,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Jewish Americans continue to be harassed, assaulted, and targeted for who they are on a daily basis and everywhere they go. But let’s be clear: we will remain proud of our Jewish culture, religion, and identities, and we will not be intimidated by bigots.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Anti-Israel Animus, Propaganda Is Leading to Violence Against Jews, Experts Warn first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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James Carville Accuses Jewish Donors of Using Antisemitism to Abandon Democrats: ‘Just Want Their F—king Tax Cut’

James Carville speaks on the Politics War Room podcast (Source: Youtube-Politics War Room)

James Carville speaks on the “Politics War Room” podcast. Photo: Screenshot

James Carville, a prominent political commentator and campaign strategist for the Democratic Party, this week accused “wealthy Jewish” donors of using campus antisemitism as an excuse not to give money to Democrats, claiming what they really want are a “f—king tax cut” from Republicans.

On his “Politics War Room” podcast, Carville told co-host Al Hunt that some wealthy Jewish donors are citing examples of antisemitism on university campuses amid the Gaza war as reasons to stop donating to the Democratic Party.

“I hear this all the time. You’ve got to try and raise money from really wealthy Jewish fundraisers. And they say, look, James, I’m a Democrat, but I can’t be a part of a party because of what happened at Columbia [University in New York City],” Carville said.

Columbia has become a hotbed of pro-Hamas activism since the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

“What the f—k did the Democrats have to do with what happened in Columbia, by the way?” Carville continued. “But you know, because they have some students at Columbia generally made an ass of themselves, well, I can’t do that, but I can be for a party that everybody endorses the Alternative for Deutschland (referring to the far-right AfD party in Germany).”

Carville then argued that these wealthy donors just want tax cuts from Republicans.

“My instinct is, and they tell me that, they look me right in the eye,” he said. “No, you just want your f—ucking tax cut.”

The longtime political strategist stressed that his comments are not aimed at “most Jewish people” but doubled down on his comment regarding tax cuts.

“That doesn’t apply to most people, most Jewish people see right through that, but the ones that don’t see through it, they just don’t really, at the end of the day, they just want their f—king tax cut. And you can see it every day.”

Carville’s comments prompted immediate backlash online, with critics accusing the political commentator of parroting antisemitic narratives regarding Jewish people and money.

Carville, the lead strategist in Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, has repeatedly condemned the Democratic Party for alienating working-class Americans by advancing culturally progressive values. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has generally been much more critical of Israel since Hamas’s invasion, in many cases championing the anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses.

This is not the first time that Carville’s comments have angered many within the Jewish community. In August 2024, Carville he drew outrage after he said that the American supports Israel over Palestinians because they are “whiter.” Roughly half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi — Jews who can trace their ethnic origins to the Middle East and North Africa.

Some pro-Israel supporters have argued that a rift has grown between the Democratic Party and Israel in the 19 months following the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people and abduction of 251 hostages throughout the southern region of the Jewish state. 

Since the conflcit began, Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war.  Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.

The post James Carville Accuses Jewish Donors of Using Antisemitism to Abandon Democrats: ‘Just Want Their F—king Tax Cut’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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