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A proud Syrian Jew fled to Amsterdam to escape abuse. Since Oct. 7, he’s been afraid to sleep in his own apartment.
(JTA) — When Shevan arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee of the Syrian Civil War, he picked up running. The habit helped him combat traumatic memories from his home country, where he was arrested for participating in peaceful demonstrations against the Assad regime in 2011.
During six months in prison, Shevan says he was tortured, raped and abused. He fled to Lebanon after his release and registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which allowed him to resettle in the Netherlands in 2013. Now 33 years old, the gay, Jewish Syrian works as an activist for LGBTQ causes and human rights.
He planned to run the Amsterdam Marathon this year with a Ukrainian flag, showing his solidarity with the country that has suffered thousands of casualties since Russia’s invasion that began in February 2022. Then a week before the marathon, war erupted between Israel and Hamas.
So Shevan carried three flags during the race on Oct. 15. He added an Israeli flag to honor the 1,400 Israelis killed and over 200 taken hostage by Hamas. And he ran with a Palestinian flag to support civilians in the Gaza Strip, whose health ministry has reported over 8,000 people killed by Israeli airstrikes amid a desperate humanitarian crisis.
Shevan hoped that running 26 miles with three flags on his back would promote his belief in peace and security for all people, from the Middle East to Europe. But three days after the marathon, he found a red swastika and Star of David painted across the window of his ground-floor apartment in Utrecht.
“I ran for peace,” said Shevan, who asked the Jewish Telegraphic Agency not to use his last name for fear of further retaliation. “What more should I do? I ran, for God’s sake, with three flags. This situation has just pushed me to be crazy.”
Shevan said he has been targeted as a Jew in the Netherlands well before this year’s Israel-Hamas war, too. Last year, he found his front door covered in swastikas, Stars of David and the word “Juden.” In 2021, while wearing a kippah on the train, he was assaulted by a Dutch man who called him a “dirty Jew” and other antisemitic curses. Over the years he has filed multiple reports with the police, but they have never made an arrest.
Since Oct. 7, Shevan has been extra careful. He no longer wears a kippah in public and he removed the mezuzah and the sign reading “Shalom” in Hebrew and English from his front door. After the attack on his window, he stopped sleeping in his own home. He uses his apartment during the day and stays with friends overnight.
“What I face right now, of course it’s not like Syria,” he said. “But I would like once in my life to have justice. I don’t want anyone to call me ‘dirty Jew,’ or ‘dirty gay,’ or ‘dirty whatever.’ I just would like to live in peace.”
Dutch Jews often report a ripple of backlash when there is fighting in Israel, according to Naomi Mestrum, director of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI), a group that tracks antisemitism in the Netherlands.
Only about 30,000 Jews live in the Netherlands. The community was decimated by the Holocaust, when roughly 100,000 were killed in death camps. Today, many Dutch people lack education on their own country’s Jewish history; earlier this year, a Claims Conference survey reported that a majority of Dutch residents did not know the Holocaust took place there.
A view of the recent vandalism on Shevan’s window. (Courtesy)
The lack of familiarity and knowledge about Jews can inflame prejudice, said Mestrum. It can also aggravate the conflation of Jewish people in the Netherlands with the actions of the Israeli government.
“The community is very small, and that means that most people in the Netherlands might have never even met a Jew,” she told JTA. “It makes them like strange creatures that are far away — it’s the unknown.”
Like other parts of Europe and the United States, the Netherlands has seen public fury boil over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the enclave’s ensuing humanitarian crisis. Thousands of Dutch protestors have demanded a ceasefire and increased aid in Gaza, including some activists who occupied the entry to the International Criminal Court in The Hague last week.
Shevan sympathizes with voices calling for peace. He has visited Israel and met both Israelis and Palestinians who advocate for a peaceful resolution to the decades-old conflict, including the Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7. But he was appalled when a Dutch neighbor, apparently outraged at the Israeli government, turned her sights toward him.
“When the war started between Israel and Hamas, I was in the supermarket and she asked me, ‘How many Palestinians did your people kill today?’” he said. “What kind of a question is this, for God’s sake? How many Palestinians did my people kill today — my people? What do you mean by my people?”
Esther Voet is the editor-in-chief of the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad, known in English as the Dutch Jewish Weekly. It is the oldest news magazine in the Netherlands — operating since 1865 — and the country’s only Jewish weekly, boasting a readership between 20,000 and 25,000 in a country of only 30,000 Jews.
After Hamas’ Oct, 7 attacks, Voet said her staff was inundated with calls. Many subscribers pleaded for a change in the delivery procedure: They did not want their magazines to arrive in its usual transparent plastic cover. If the magazine did not change its packaging, some readers said they would cancel their subscriptions.
“We decided to put it in a white anonymous envelope, so that their neighbors do not know they are Jewish,” Voet told JTA.
A recent cover of the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad reads “We are one.” (Courtesy of Esther Voet)
At CIDI, Mestrum has also been overwhelmed with calls from tense Jewish families.
“We are getting a lot of phone calls from parents that are worried about their kids going to school,” she said. “We have incidents of kids getting very nasty comments, praising Hitler or praising Hamas for finishing Hitler’s job.”
On Oct. 13, Amsterdam’s three Jewish schools closed as a precautionary measure, following a former Hamas leader’s call for street protests across the Muslim world that day. Some of the city’s synagogues have reported a rise in threats over recent weeks.
Chanan Hertzberger, chairman of the Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands, told JTA that his organization has pushed for increased security around the country’s synagogues and Jewish schools. Authorities in several Dutch cities were quick to shore up their protection around Jewish institutions after Hamas’ attacks, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his government has been “extra alert” to the issue.
But many members of the Jewish community are still fearful, said Hertzberger. And as they see antisemitism flaring in their backyard, many can no longer view Israel as a safe refuge.
“The community got a big blow,” he said. “We always regarded Israel as the place where we can always go, no matter what happens.”
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The post A proud Syrian Jew fled to Amsterdam to escape abuse. Since Oct. 7, he’s been afraid to sleep in his own apartment. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document 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.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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