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Anti-Israel Faculty Target University Presidents With New Tactic in Bid to Oust Them Over Campus Protest Response
Anti-Israel faculty have been increasingly using a new tactic to push to terminate university presidents who punished students and requested police help in ending an ongoing paroxysm of pro-Hamas demonstrations that began erupting on college campuses across the US last month.
Votes of no confidence in the presidents’ leadership have happened or are forthcoming at Barnard College, Emory University, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly), and potentially other schools — a measure that all but guarantees a new leader will be installed at those schools.
On Tuesday, Barnard College President Laura Rosenbury lost a no-confidence vote handily, with 77 percent of participating faculty voting against her in an apparent act of retribution prompted by her suspending over 50 anti-Israel protesters and evicting them from campus. The action was, according to The Columbia Spectator, the first no-confidence vote against a president in the college’s history. The move came after the Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) unanimously recommended the vote, citing the college’s decision to suspend students involved in the demonstrations.
At Emory, meanwhile, 90 percent of faculty members in Oxford College, an undergraduate division of the university, voted “no confidence” in President Gregory Fenves this week, according to The Emory Wheel. The vote came after Fenves took similar measures to end unauthorized demonstrations on campus and clear an encampment where the protesters had planted themselves.
Pro-Hamas demonstrations at Emory saw numerous clashes between law enforcement and students and faculty. In one instance, economics professor Caroline Fohlin was arrested for attempting to prevent the detention of a protester. Officers restrained her, bringing her to the ground, while she said repeatedly, “I’m a professor!” In another incident, students pelted objects at officers while using their bodies to press them against a building.
The faculty at Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences are currently holding their own no-confidence vote, the results of which will reportedly be unveiled on Friday afternoon.
In Texas, over 600 members of the UT Austin faculty have signed a letter proclaiming they “no longer have confidence” in President Jay Hartzell, who invited local police to quell unauthorized anti-Israel demonstrations which resulted in students commandeering a section of campus and refusing to leave. The UT Austin chapter of the AAUP spearheaded the effort.
“We, faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, no longer have confidence in President Jay Hartzell,” the letter said, describing the restoration of order during final exams as a violation of trust. “We demand that criminal charges against students and others be dropped. We demand that the students not face disciplinary action at the university for their activities on April 24.”
Other school presidents have faced similar backlash for seeking to restore order on campus. At Cal Poly last week, 193 of 203 faculty attendees voted no confidence in President Tom Jackson Jr. Then on Monday, over 300 faculty members signed a letter demanding that Jackson and his chief of staff, Mark Johnson, resign, lambasting them for calling the police on student protesters when they occupied a campus building.
The wave of no-confidence votes, which may grow in the days ahead, came amid an explosion of anti-Israel demonstrations at universities amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Indeed, for the past two weeks college students have been amassing in the hundreds at a growing number of schools, taking over sections of campuses by setting up “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” and refusing to leave unless administrators condemn and boycott Israel. Footage of the protests has shown demonstrators chanting in support of Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization; calling for the destruction of Israel; and even threatening to harm members of the Jewish community on campus. In many cases, activists have also lambasted the US and Western civilization more broadly.
The protests initially erupted across the US but have since spread to university campuses around the world, primarily in the West.
Scrutiny of faculty participation in the pro-Hamas demonstrations and efforts to change university leadership is necessary but has been lacking in public discourse about the protests, according to experts who have spoken with The Algemeiner since the disruptions began.
On several campuses — including George Washington University in Washington, DC, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of Southern California, among others — faculty have colluded with or joined students in calling for the destruction of Israel and celebrating Hamas’ violence against the Jewish state as a form of “resistance.”
At Northeastern University in Boston, professors formed a human barrier around a student encampment to stop its dismantling by officers. At Columbia University in New York, faculty at the school, as well its affiliate Barnard College, staged a walkout in support of the demonstrations and demanded the abeyance of disciplinary sanctions against anti-Zionist students — dozens of whom cheered Hamas and threatened more massacres of Jews similar to Oct. 7 — who have violated school rules.
The power of faculty — an overwhelming majority of whom identify as leftist — to govern the university and set the tone of its culture has been a key source of radicalism and anti-American ideas that have wielded significant influence in the academy, according to campus antisemitism expert Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who founded the AMCHA Initiative watchdog group.
“It’s the faculty. Faculty are behind the vote of no confidence at Barnard College and also at [Cal Poly],” Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner this week. “Faculty run the university, and they are out of control. They have tenure, and university presidents do not. So, it’s not that administrators are capitulating to students. They are capitulating to the faculty, because they know that if they run afoul of the faculty, they are history”
Breaking the faculty’s hold on American higher education, she argued, can only come with the abolition of tenure and a wholesale reformation of higher education.
“This situation is not sustainable, and we have to focus specifically on the faculty. Take away their shared governance. Take away their tenure,” she said. “You have to get rid of tenure because it has protected faculty whose goal is to upend and undermine the university itself. It’s not just about social justice — their aim for decades has been to destroy the university as we know it and to use the university as a tool for revolutionizing society. If you can’t recognize how illegitimate that is, then the universities are lost. We will lose if we do not have the will to take them on.”
Asaf Romirowsky, an expert on the Middle East and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner that since the 1960s, far-left “scholar activists” have gradually seized control of the higher education system, tailoring admissions processes and the curricula to foster ideological radicalism and conformity, which students then carry with them into careers in government, law, corporate America, and education.
“This is 1984,” he explained, alluding to George Orwell’s classic novel about a dystopian state. “As we can see, these rallies are not peaceful as their supporters have insisted. They are violent, verbally and physically. People are ending up in the hospital with injuries. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, and that should be a wake-up call to the American people. If these are the institutions that should be the vanguard of American democracy and Western values and this is what they are producing, we should be seriously questioning the functionality of higher education as a whole.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Israel Faculty Target University Presidents With New Tactic in Bid to Oust Them Over Campus Protest Response first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Taps Fiery Pro-Israel Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador
US President-elect Donald Trump has selected Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations, a decision which, if confirmed by the US Senate, would ensure that a staunch pro-Israel advocate represents the incoming administration in the international body.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as US ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump, who last Tuesday became the first former president elected to a nonconsecutive term in over a century, said in a statement first reported by the New York Post. “Elise is an incredibly, strong, tough and smart America First fighter.”
Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, confirmed the news and issued her own statement on the nomination.
“I am truly honored to earn President Trump’s nomination to serve in his Cabinet as US Ambassador to the United Nations,” he lawmaker said. “During my conversation with President Trump, I shared how deeply humbled I am to accept his nomination and that I look forward to earning the support of my colleagues in the United States Senate.”
Stefanik continued, “President Trump’s historic landslide election has given hope to the American people and is a reminder that brighter days are ahead — both at home and abroad … America continues to be the beacon of the world, but we expect and must demand that our friends and allies be strong partners in the peace we seek.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, Stefanik is one of the leading pro-Israel voices in Washington, DC, having defended both the US-Israel alliance and the civil rights of Jewish students on college campuses, where aggressive pro-Hamas activists have launched campaigns of violence, obstruction, and intimidation aimed at forcing Jewish life underground and severing higher education institutions’ ties to Israel.
Stefanik, 40, a Harvard University alumnus from Albany, New York, currently serves on the US House committees for intelligence, armed services, and education and the workforce. In May, she delivered what her office described as a “historic” speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, an address she used to express support for the Jewish state’s war with Hamas, as well as to explicate her views on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East.
“I have been clear at home and I will be clear here: There is no excuse for an American president to block aid to Israel — aid that was duly passed by the Congress,” she said. “There is no excuse to ease sanctions on Iran, paying a $6 billion ransom to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, or to dither and hide while our friends fight for their lives. No excuse. Full stop.”
She continued, “I’m proud to have sponsored, or backed, every measure to aid Israel that has come before the United States Congress. Every single on. It’s why, I, as a senior member on the House Armed Services Committee and Intelligence Committee, we have helped secure billions of dollars for the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, the Iron Beam, anti-tunneling technology, counter-UAS system, and further development of emerging technologies.”
At home, Stefanik has sharply interrogated university presidents over what many observers have perceived as indifference to antisemitic hatred on college campuses and a refusal to quell riotous demonstrations which disrupted academic activities for weeks on end during the 2023-2024 academic year. Several weeks before addressing the Knesset, Stefanik grilled Northwestern University president Michael Schill over the now-infamous Deering Meadow Agreement, which granted concessions to a pro-Hamas group that commandeered a section of campus and refused to surrender it unless the administration commenced a boycott of Israel. The agreement was a “unilateral capitulation,” Stefanik said, claiming that Schill’s actions created an impression that he opposed protecting Jewish students from violence.
“Let’s talk about what has occurred on this encampment,” Stefanik asserted. “Isn’t it true that a Jewish Northwestern student was assaulted?”
Stefanik went on to recount several more incidents of alleged antisemitic violence — including one in which a Jewish student was spit on — and harassment at Northwestern, pressing Schill to estimate when the school will complete its investigations of the criminal behavior.
In July, Stefanik sponsored legislation which would punish universities that fail to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. The University Accountability Act (UAA) proposed levying a tax on universities which, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, declined to punish perpetrators of antisemitic behavior. The Protecting American Students Act (PASA), prompted by reports that foreign students overwhelmingly contribute to antisemitism on college campuses, called for taxing the endowments of universities that admit more foreign students than American ones.
A rising star in the Republican Party, Stefanik’s record as a public servant has had some controversy. In 2022, she refused to withdraw her endorsement of a congressional primary candidate, Carl Paladino, who once lauded Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today … somebody inspirational.” While Paladino apologized for his comments about the Nazi leader after they were reported — saying, “I understand that invoking Hitler in any context is a serious mistake and rightfully upsets people. I strongly condemn the murderous atrocities committed against the Jewish people by Hitler and the Nazis” — he accused the organization which reported his remarks, Media Matters, of reaching a “new low.”
Stefanik had previously pledged support for Paladino in a tweet which described him as a “friend,” “job creator,” and “conservative outsider who will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York.” Following reports of his comments, her office declined to state unequivocally whether she would continue to support his candidacy, saying only that “Congresswoman Stefanik has one of the strongest records in the US Congress condemning antisemitism and led and passed bipartisan legislation to expand Holocaust education.”
Ultimately, Stefanik threw her star power behind Paladino, campaigning for him and sponsoring a tele-rally which promoted his candidacy.
Stefanik is also one of several Republicans who did not oppose then-President Trump’s effort to halt the transfer of power following his general election loss to Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the Electoral College and won the popular vote. Echoing claims of widespread voter fraud in key battleground states, she voted against Congress certifying the results of the race in Pennsylvania, which Biden won by a slim 1.17 percent margin.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Taps Fiery Pro-Israel Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Ex-IDF Soldier Becomes First Republican in 50 Years to Win New York State Assembly Seat in Long Island District
A former officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) became the first Republican to win a state assembly seat in northern Hempstead, Long Island in more than 50 years.
Daniel Norber narrowly defeated two-term Democratic incumbent Gina Silitti to capture the 16th District of the New York State Assembly. The district encompasses most of Nassau County, an area which maintains a significant Jewish population.
Norber’s victory came amid a huge surge in support for Republican candidates across the country. US President-elect Donald Trump won the 16th District by over 2,000 votes, assisting Norber, a dual US-Israeli citizen, secure victory in his history-making down-ballot race.
The ex-IDF officer’s win also came in the midst of increasing antisemitism across the country. In the year following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, Jewish families in Nassau County have reported being targeted with hate crimes.
In September, a Jewish family in Nassau County alleged that a suspect urinated on their front door and yelled antisemitic slurs. Months earlier in April, county officials denounced antisemitic graffiti which covered the faces of hostages taken captive by Hamas during the Oct. 7 onslaught. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who is Jewish, has also accused Civil Service Employees Association Local 830, an 8,000-member local union, of antisemitism for distributing flyers depicting him with devil horns.
Silitti, Norber’s opponent, found herself in hot water with the local Jewish community after one of her staffers bashed Israel on social media.
“She wasn’t sensitive to what was going on. I felt she was out of touch,” Norber, 45, told the New York Post.
Though Norber focused his campaign on domestic issues such as bolstering law enforcement and cutting taxes, he believes that his support for Israel also helped him establish valuable inroads with the local Jewish community. Moreover, his grandparents endured the Holocaust and his mother ran away from communism in the Soviet Union.
Norber was also on the ground in Israel during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks with his wife and four kids.
“It was the worst atrocity to Jews since the Holocaust. Israel is not the same anymore,” Norber said, according to the Post.
Norber has also touted a series of policies which would likely bolster Jewish safety in Nassau County. In the New York State Assembly, he aims to implement a statewide mask ban with the goal of preventing anonymity during protests — a popular tactic employed by activists during anti-Israel demonstrations to hid their identity. The lawmaker also wants to repeal cashless bail, with the intention of reducing the number of violent criminals on the streets.
The post Ex-IDF Soldier Becomes First Republican in 50 Years to Win New York State Assembly Seat in Long Island District first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Challah for Ceasefire’?: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on watching the political tightrope in women’s media
In the before-times, a personal essay in a women’s magazine about home-baked challah, in which the writer discusses how this ritual connects them to their Jewish roots, would be a […]
The post ‘Challah for Ceasefire’?: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on watching the political tightrope in women’s media appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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