RSS
‘Nothing Was Going to Stop Me’: Despite Hamas Firing Rockets, Israelis Gather to Mark Oct. 7 Anniversary
People gather in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv to mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Photo: Paulina Patimer
The whirring sounds of helicopters and booms from the fighting in Gaza punctuated the early morning memorial ceremony at the site of the Supernova rave, where nearly 400 people were killed and dozens more taken hostage to Gaza exactly one year earlier during Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct. 7.
The ceremony began at 6:29 am — the minute Hamas terrorists began gunning down revelers under the cover of rocket fire — with a minute’s silence.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the ceremony, saying it was a date that would “live in infamy.”
“Exactly one year ago, right here in this forest and throughout the area, hundreds of our dear brothers and sisters were massacred, murdered, kidnapped, and raped,” he said. “Innocent citizens, who lived their lives in peace, who came to celebrate at a party. It was the greatest disaster since our founding.”
At the same time, Herzog also recalled the “extraordinary acts of spirit” by the Israeli people in the wake of the onslaught and called for Oct. 7 to reflect a day of unity in the country going forward.
The event was marred by the sounds of sirens in the nearby communities of Holit and Sufa when four rockets were fired from northern Gaza, three of which were intercepted and one landing in an open field. The barrage was one of many throughout the day from both Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon and Hamas in the south in Gaza, extending as far as the central city of Tel Aviv. Hamas’s military wing later took responsibility for the strike on Tel Aviv, saying it had launched M16 rockets. But according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Hamas had planned much more intensive rocket attacks that were foiled when fighter jets struck several launchers and tunnels across Gaza moments before 6:30 am.
Eric Goldstein, CEO of the UJA-Federation, addressed the crowd in English, reflecting on the interconnectedness between Israeli and Diaspora Jews.
“We the Jews of America deeply understand that an attack against you is an attack against us,” he said. “The events of Oct. 7 and the reverberations in America showed how deeply interconnected we truly are and we are forever indebted to you, the people of Israel, for fighting and sacrificing on behalf of Jews everywhere.”
He hailed the “extraordinary heroism and resilience” of Nova survivors.
“The courage, the unbreakable spirit, the determination of the Nova tribe to keep dancing has moved all of us in an incredibly profound way. Please know that the New York Jewish community, the American Jewish community, will be with the Nova tribe and all of the people of Israel forever,” he concluded.
Many attendees said they were not deterred from coming, despite the threat from Gaza, just two miles away, and the Home Front Command’s advice to stay close to shelters. “I had to come; I lost so many friends here that day,” Ily Cohen, who wore a t-shirt bearing the images of two of his murdered friends, told The Algemeiner. “If I didn’t come, I would regret it for the rest of my life. I don’t know how this scar will ever heal.”
Rami Davidian, a 58-year-old farmer hailed as a national hero for risking his life to save hundreds during the Supernova massacre by repeatedly shuttling people from the site to safety, said he still suffers from severe PTSD due to the horrific scenes he witnessed that day.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. I’m trying to make the connection between the Rami of Oct. 6 [2023] and the Rami of now. But I’m failing,” he told The Algemeiner.
Rami Davidian. Photo: Taken by author
Ceremonies were held all day in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, beginning the prior evening with several members of the hostages family, including released hostage Sapir Cohen, whose partner Sasha Troufanov is still being held captive.
Sapir, who was released in November, reflected on her time in captivity, sharing a deep sense of divine providence, even though she doesn’t consider herself particularly religious. “I saw a girl curled up like a fetus, shaking, and a man sitting with his eyes closed for hours, refusing to open them or be part of the situation. At that moment, I realized God had sent me to a place where I could do something truly meaningful — I could help the other hostages,” she said. “From that point on, I didn’t care if I would continue to live or what would happen to me. I simply put all my problems aside and transformed from a fearful person with many anxieties into a strong, confident individual.”
Sapir Cohen, who survived Hamas captivity. Photo: Lior Rotstein
Here, too, members of the public said they weren’t nervous about coming out, despite the threat of rocket and terror attacks from multiple fronts.
“I’m not scared at all. I came to show solidarity, nothing was going to stop me,” Irit Shachar told The Algemeiner.
A moment of silence was observed by the families of hostages the following morning outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem.
Levi Ben Baruch, cousin of American hostage Edan Alexander, speaking at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Residence on Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: Paulina Patimer
Shir Siegel, the daughter of former hostage Aviva Siegel, and Keith Siegel, who is still being held in Gaza, said, “A year since 15 terrorists broke into my parents’ house. A year of mortal fear that no one can understand. A year since my father was shot and slammed against the wall by terrorists, who broke his ribs. A year has passed, but it feels like one long day. 101 hostages are still in Oct. 7th, still praying for rescue, hoping to be told they’re going home to their families, safe at last.”
Niva Wenkert, the mother of Omer Wenkert, addressed her son: “Omeri, my life, I miss you. I feel your absence with every breath, every moment in my body. What I fear most, my Omeri, is the look in your eyes when you return, asking: ‘Where were you?’”
Another memorial organized by the families of victims and hostages was planned for later in the evening at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, coinciding with the government-led event in Ofakim, a southern town that also bore the brunt of the Hamas attack. Both memorials were set to be held without an audience due to security concerns and broadcast on national television.
The post ‘Nothing Was Going to Stop Me’: Despite Hamas Firing Rockets, Israelis Gather to Mark Oct. 7 Anniversary first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
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.
RSS
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.
RSS
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. 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.”
James Carville launches into an unhinged rant, accusing wealthy Jewish donors of not wanting to give him money for the Democrat Party at fundraisers over rampant college campus anti-Semitism. Carville claims Jews will vote for Nazis just to “get their f-cking tax cuts.” pic.twitter.com/gM5EYHWlaQ
— Bad Hombre (@joma_gc) June 5, 2025
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.