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‘Time to Begin Wreaking Havoc’: MIT Student Calls for Violence to Oppose Israel, ‘Escalate for Palestine’
A pro-Hamas encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 6, 2024. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has reportedly banished from campus a student who penned an article which argued that violence was a legitimate method of effecting political change to fight Israel and support “Palestine.”
First reported on Tuesday by the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), an anti-Israel group associated with National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the school’s decision — as of yet unconfirmed by MIT officials — stands to reverse an impression that MIT lacks the resolve to punish students who use the campus to break university rules while holding raucous demonstrations against the world’s lone Jewish state.
Titled “On Pacifism,” the article — published in the MIT student publication Written Revolution and flanked by images of members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist group — argued that activists have failed to stop Israel’s war against Hamas and sunder the US-Israel relationship because of “our own decision to embrace nonviolence as our primary vehicle of change.”
The author, PhD candidate Prahlad Iyengar, continued, “One year into a horrific genocide, it is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc, or else, as we’ve seen, business will indeed go on as usual … As people of conscience in the world, we have a duty to Palestine and to all the globally oppressed. We have a mandate to exact a cost from the institutions that have contributed to the growth and proliferation of colonialism, racism, and all oppressive systems. We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against.”
In a statement distributed by the CAA, Iyengar accused MIT of weaponizing the disciplinary system to persecute him.
“On Friday, MIT administration informed me that as a result of this article, I have been banned from campus without due process and that I face potential expulsion or suspension,” he said. “These extraordinary actions should concern everyone on campus. My article attempts a historical review of the type of tactics used by protest movements throughout history, from the civil rights movement to the struggle to the fight [sic] against South African Apartheid here on MIT campus.”
MIT has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s inquiry regarding Iyengar’s punishment, but according to excerpts of its letter to Iyengar, the administration told him the article “makes several troubling statements” and could be perceived as “a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT.” In retaliation, CAA is calling on students to harass David Randall, an associate dean, until he relents and revokes Iyengar’s punishment and Written Revolution‘s temporary suspension.
“On Pacifism” is not the first time that elite college students have endorsed violence in the name of opposing Israel and furthering the Palestinian cause.
In September, during Columbia University’s convocation ceremony, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group which recently split due to racial tensions between Arabs and non-Arabs, distributed literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said the pamphlet distributed by CUAD, a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
Last month, on the first anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, massacre across southern Israel, when Jews around the world mourned the victims of the brutal onslaught, a Harvard University student group called on pro-Hamas activists to “Bring the war home” and proceeded to vandalize an a campus administrative building. The group members, who described themselves as “anonymous,” later said in a statement, “We are committed to bringing the war home and answering the call to open up a new front here in the belly of the beast.” On the same day, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) issued a similar statement, saying “now is the time to escalate,” adding, “Harvard’s insistence on funding slaughter only strengthens our moral imperative and commitment to our demands.”
Pro-Hamas activists in academia have already demonstrated that they are willing to hurt people to make their point.
Last year, in California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. Violence, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
“The antisemitic, anti-Zionist vitriol we’ve witnessed on campus is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement in September. “Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidation and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion. Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality, or political views, and they need to start now.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Time to Begin Wreaking Havoc’: MIT Student Calls for Violence to Oppose Israel, ‘Escalate for Palestine’ 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. 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.
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Syria to Give UN Watchdog Inspectors Access to Suspected Former Nuclear Sites as New Regime Seeks Sanctions Relief
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi speaks to the media, in Tehran, Iran, April 17, 2025. Photo: Iranian Atomic Organization/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Syria’s new government has agreed to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog — with immediate access to former nuclear sites, signaling a move to restore international trust as it hopes to have international sanctions lifted.
On Wednesday, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told the Associated Press that Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa has shown a “very positive disposition to talk to us and allow us to carry out the activities we need to.”
After meeting with Sharaa in Damascus, he expressed hope that the inspection process would be completed within the coming months.
The IAEA’s goal is “to bring total clarity over certain activities that took place in the past that were, in the judgment of the agency, probably related to nuclear weapons,” Grossi said.
He also noted that Syria’s new leadership is “committed to opening up to the world, to international cooperation.”
Last year, the IAEA conducted inspections at several sites of interest in Damascus while former President Bashar al-Assad was still in power.
Under Assad’s rule, the country was believed to have operated a secret nuclear program, which included an undeclared nuclear reactor built by North Korea in Deir el-Zour province, in eastern Syria — a fact that was revealed after Israel destroyed the facility in a 2007 airstrike.
Since the collapse of Assad’s regime in December, the IAEA has been looking to regain access to sites associated with the country’s nuclear program.
In addition to conducting inspections, Grossi said the agency is prepared to provide Syria’s new government with equipment for nuclear medicine and to help rebuild the country’s radiotherapy and oncology infrastructure.
“And the president has expressed to me that he’s interested in exploring, in the future, nuclear energy as well,” Grossi said.
Last month, US President Donald Trump announced the lifting of sanctions on Syria — a major policy shift that aligns with the European Union’s efforts to support the country’s recovery and political transition.
As Sharaa focuses on rebuilding Syria after years of conflict, the lifting of Western sanctions that isolated the country from the global financial system is expected to boost its weakened economy by paving the way for greater humanitarian aid, foreign investment, and international trade.
Earlier this year, Sharaa became Syria’s transitional president after leading the rebel campaign that ousted Assad, whose Iran-backed rule had strained ties with the Arab world during the nearly 14-year Syrian war.
The offensive that led to the fall of the Assad regime was spearheaded by Sharaa’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, a former al-Qaeda affiliate.
Since then, Sharaa has repeatedly pledged to unify Syria’s armed forces and restore stability after years of civil war. However, the new government continues to face major hurdles in convincing the international community of its commitment to peace.
Incidents of sectarian violence — including the mass killing of pro-Assad Alawites in March — have deepened fears among minority groups about the rise of Islamist factions and drawn condemnation from global powers currently engaged in discussions on sanctions relief and humanitarian aid.
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