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Anti-Israel Media Bias Flares in Martha’s Vineyard Paper
Houses and a welcome sign in Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts island that sits in the Atlantic just south of Cape Cod.
News coverage in the Martha’s Vineyard Times tends to stick to local concerns — labor negotiations between the Steamship Authority and the union that operates the ferry between the island and Cape Cod, the perennial shortage of “affordable” housing for year-round and seasonal workers, shark sightings.
For the past few weeks, though, the Times has been on a campaign against the Martha’s Vineyard Chabad after it hosted a Jewish cultural festival event featuring the singer Matisyahu.
Instead of writing about the festival, the newspaper highlighted a small anti-Israel protest against it. Then it ran another story focusing on a protester-participant, and a third story attacking the festival’s organizer.
One Times news article referred to Israel’s “brutal military campaign” and quoted a protester who said, “We are here to reject the presence of someone who performs and fundraises for the Israeli Occupation Forces and the AIPAC lobbying group, condones violence against the Palestinian people and land in the name of Jewish safety, and denies ongoing genocide.”
The onslaught of hostile coverage has generated a disappointed response from readers.
One of them, Jackie Mendez, took to the newspaper’s comments section. “What is Jewish culture? The MVTimes doesn’t care to explain. Instead, it chooses to give yet more time and space to the ignorance and hatred of Israel,” Mendez wrote. “This newspaper gave editorial space to this kind of rabid Jew-hatred.”
Another reader, Judith Hannan, a former columnist for the Times, wrote in a letter to the editor, “The main issue I think so many of us have is that an event to celebrate a rich and diverse culture, under a literal and metaphorical broad tent, was covered with such bias so the reader walks away with no more understanding of Jewish heritage and culture than they had already.”
The rabbi of Chabad on the Vineyard, Tzvi Alperowitz, wrote in an email to his community that he was disappointed by the coverage. “The Jewish Culture Festival was a tremendous and remarkable community celebration. Close to one thousand people gathered in absolute harmony and unity to proudly celebrate Jewish culture and identity,” Alperowitz wrote. “But instead of a beautiful story about Jewish resilience and celebration in spite of the most tragic year for Jews since the Holocaust, the MV Times cynically chose to paint their coverage of the event through the lens of the few protesters who stood outside.”
Alperowitz continued: “That’s a choice that reflects poorly on the MV Times and its editorial team. Every rational individual can see straight through the piece and understands that it was a cynical use of clickbait to turn a proudly Jewish event into an opinion article bashing Israel.”
Who is in charge at the Martha’s Vineyard Times? The paper was purchased in January of this year by Stephen Bernier, who installed as publisher Charles Sennott. Sennott is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Boston Globe, where he was notorious for the anti-Israel tilt of his coverage. The watchdog organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) called Sennott “a virtual spokesman for the Palestinian side,” warning that “under Charles Sennott, the Boston Globe is in danger of reviving its former tradition of blaming Israel first, no matter what the facts.”
Since leaving the Globe, Sennott has been pursuing nonprofit journalism ventures, the latest of which is The GroundTruth Project, where he is listed as the founder and editor-in-chief. The GroundTruth website also lists former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet as one of its directors, and the Ford Foundation as among its funders.
CAMERA has also been sharply critical of Sennott’s work with the GroundTruth Project. A CAMERA report on a three-part Sennott series attacking Christian Zionism called the work “outrageous” and said it featured “bigoted and sloppy reporting.”
“Sennott indoctrinates young journalists with his long-standing anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Evangelical biases,” Dexter Van Zile, then with CAMERA, wrote in a 2019 blog post for the Times of Israel. Van Zile then quoted David Parsons, vice president and senior international spokesperson for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. “There are only two journalists I will never work with again and one of them is Charles Sennott,” Parsons said.
In a Dec. 15, 2023, LinkedIn posting, just weeks before assuming the Martha’s Vineyard Times role, Sennott faulted Israel for deliberately and “with impunity” killing scores of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists. Israel has disclosed evidence that some of the “journalists” were members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations. Sennott’s article, while faulting Israel, also omitted that Hamas restricts the activities of journalists in Gaza, with threats of violence.
I wrote to Sennott asking him whether he is trying to turn the weekly island newspaper into a vehicle for pushing an anti-Israel agenda, or whether there is a conflict in his dual roles at the Martha’s Vineyard Times and at the Ground Truth Project.
So far, I haven’t gotten a reply from him.
Update: Sennott responded to The Algemeiner after press time, and his response will be the subject of a forthcoming column.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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UCLA Faculty Group Denounces School’s ‘Ongoing Silence’ Amid Rampant Campus Antisemitism
Illustrative: Anti-Israel protesters set up camp on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, CA on April 25, 2024. Photo: Alberto Sibaja via Reuters Connect.
A Jewish faculty group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is sounding the alarm about antisemitism on the campus, issuing an open letter calling attention to a slew of indignities to which they are subjected.
The primary agent of anti-Jewish hatred named by the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg) is the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism (AAAR), a university-created body that has allegedly violated its mission to promote pluralism by lodging defaming accusations at the pro-Israel Jewish community in a series of reports, the latest of which contained what JFrg described as intolerable distortions of fact.
“The [AAAR] has released a deeply misleading report that falsely accuses Jewish faculty, staff, and students of harassment while ignoring the documented, escalating antisemitism at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM),” JFrg’s letter said. “DGSOM and UCLA’s ongoing silence concerning rising antisemitism continues to encourage more antisemitism, as we can plainly see in this report. JFrg unequivocally rejects this baseless and inflammatory report, and calls on the UCLA administration, DGSOM leadership, and the public to confront the reality of antisemitism at UCLA.”
JFRG’s letter went on to enumerate a slew of falsehoods included in the AAAR’s report, including that Jewish faculty have conspired to undermine academic freedom with “coordinated repression, involving university and non-university actors,” align itself with conservative groups, and harm minority students by opposing “racial justice.”
The AAAR report, reviewed by The Algemeiner, even stated that its existence was not spurred by documented incidents of discriminatory conduct but what it falsely called “the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
“One particularly egregious falsehood in the UCLA Task Force report accuses JFrg of attempting to ‘silence advocacy’ since 2021 — two years prior to the groupss formation following the tragic events of Oct. 7, 2023,” JFrg continued, “This claim not only discredits the report but perpetuates harmful antisemitic tropes about covert Jewish influence. This is not just a factual error — it is a textbook example of an antisemitic conspiracy theory: the idea that Jews secretly control institutions, dictate policy, and are responsible for all negative events.”
JFrg added that life for faculty at the Geffen medical school has wreaked demonstrable harm on Jewish students and faculty. Student clubs, it said, are denied recognition for arbitrary reasons; Jewish faculty whose ethnic backgrounds were previously unknown are purged from the payrolls upon being identified as Jews; and anyone who refuses to participate in anti-Zionist events is “intimidated” and pressured.
The group charged that school officials neither condemn the alleged behavior nor take steps the correct the hostile environment it has fostered.
“DGSOM’s continued silence in the face of a sustained and deeply troubling rise in antisemitism within its own institution is not just complicity — it is a failure of responsibility,” the letter concluded. “Without strong and principled leadership, this dangerous pattern will persist. We recognize that previous UCLA administrations … failed to respond to our calls for investigations and education — overlooking critical teaching moments that lie at the heart of a university’s mission. However, we remain hopeful that the new UCLA administration will seize this opportunity to engage meaningfully, foster real education and moral clarity, and lead the campus toward a more inclusive and principled future based on respectful, evidence-based dialogue, and academic integrity.”
JFrg’s letter came after the UCLA campus was devastated by anti-Israel protests during last year’s spring semester, including the creation of a so-called “Gaza solidarity encampment” on campus from which Jewish students were barred entry.
Meanwhile, Jewish health and medical professionals have seen a stark rise in antisemitism in their workplaces, according to a recent study conducted by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group.
The study found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims.
Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom relayed harrowing accounts of overhearing their colleagues within their professional or academic environments say that Zionists should not receive medical care, being subject to “social and professional isolation,” and being doxxed as retaliation for reporting antisemitic behavior. The problem has left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, “feeling unsafe or threatened,” StandWithUs said in a press release which announced that the study has been published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
“This study represents the experiences of health-care professionals from 32 states, offering critical insights into the pervasiveness of antisemitism in our profession,” said Dr. Kelly Michelson, co-author of the study and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. “It is imperative for medical institutions to incorporate training that confronts antisemitism to ensure the safety and inclusivity of all health-care professionals.”
The researchers also said that the findings necessitate an expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings to include antisemitism education.
StandWithUs’s study followed a similar one published in Canada in December, in which Jewish doctors reported being chased not only out of the field of medicine but also out of the country. Commissioned by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario (JMAO), that survey found that 80 percent of Jewish medical workers who responded to it “have faced antisemitism at work” since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7 and that 31 percent of Jewish doctors — 98 percent of whom “are worried about the impact of antisemitism on health care” — have weighed emigrating from Canada to another country.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Hamas-Linked Lobbying Network Expands Political Influence in Europe, New Report Shows
LP4Q Europe network held its first press conference in the European Parliament (April 2024). From Left to Right: MEP David Cormand, MP Malik Ben Achour, Michele Piras, Senator Raymonde Poncet Monge, MP Thomas Portes. Photo: NGO Monitor
A Turkey-based lobbying network with ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is working to recruit European politicians to support anti-Israel policies, according to a new investigative report.
NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute that tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations, published a report last week on the expansion of the League of Parliamentarians for Al-Quds and Palestine (LP4Q).
This political lobby network, which was established in 2015 and includes about 1,500 parliamentarians from around the world, is growing its influence across several European countries.
Vincent Chebat, senior researcher at NGO Monitor, authored the report, which exposes the dysfunction in the ways interest groups operate within European parliaments. He noted that the information about LP4Q’s connections to Hamas and the involvement of highly controversial European representatives in a lobby group backed by Turkey and Qatar was easily accessible.
“The lack of basic vetting is remarkable,” he told The Algemeiner. “It is not surprising that far-left MPs, some belonging to parties that have repeatedly refused to recognize Hamas as a terrorist entity, were involved in establishing this network.”
Since 2023, LP4Q members have met with current and former members of parliaments across Europe and activists in the European Parliament, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Scotland, and Finland.
The organization is also “preparing to expand” its activities to Portugal, the Netherlands, and eastern Europe.
LP4Q describes itself as an organization established “at the initiative of parliamentarians who support Palestinian rights.”
Last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken supporter of Hamas and a fierce critic of Israel, said that “the League of Parliamentarians for al-Quds has become the voice of the Palestinian issue at the global level.”
Michele Piras, a former Italian member of parliament and current LP4Q board member, leads the group’s expansion in Europe and has reportedly engaged with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization that participated in Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to NGO Monitor.
Last year, LP4Q’s European Network held its first meeting at the French National Assembly, bringing together 20 parliamentarians from several European countries to discuss, as they described, “the pressing need for Europe to take decisive action to halt the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
The New Executive Board of the League of Parliamentarians for al-Quds and Palestine Holds its First Meeting (May 2024). Photo: NGO Monitor
“Participants advocated for measures such as the cessation of military cooperation with Israel, an arms embargo, an immediate ceasefire, and the provision of humanitarian aid to civilians,” LP4Q wrote in a statement.
“Additionally, support was voiced for pursuing legal avenues, including actions before the International Court of Justice, to ensure severe condemnation of Israeli crimes,” the statement continued.
During the meeting, members also argued for “the recognition of an independent Palestinian State … and the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
NGO Monitor reported that 160 current and former European parliamentarians signed a petition outlining their positions on the French communist website L’Humanité as part of the European Network’s launch. The signatories included 99 French, 23 Italian, 12 Belgian, and 14 Spanish MPs, senators, and MEPs (member of European Parliament).
Until its expansion to Europe, LP4Q was originally composed of members of parliament from Muslim countries, with at least two of its board members linked to Hamas and having been sanctioned by the US government.
For example, LP4Q President Hamid bin Abdullah Al-Ahmar, a Yemeni businessman, is considered one of Hamas’s most prominent international supporters, according to the US Treasury Department. He also played a key role in Hamas’s investment portfolio, which managed over $500 million worth of assets at its peak.
In 2021, Al-Ahmar met now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to discuss “the political developments related to the Palestinian issue, the dangers facing it, ways to confront them, and the required national, regional, and international work strategies, especially within the parliamentary framework represented by the Parliamentarians for Jerusalem Association.”
Other LP4Q members and officials also have ties to Hamas. For example, board member Sayed Salem Abu-Msameh has been described as “one of the founders of Hamas” and was reportedly sentenced by Israel to 12 years in prison for helping to establish the terrorist group’s military wing.
LP4Q board vice presidents Hasan Turan, a Turkish member of parliament, and Ahmed Kharchi, an Algerian member of parliament, have also been linked to Hamas, with Turan reportedly facilitating high-level meetings between senior Hamas leaders and Turkish political elites.
According to NGO Monitor, LP4Q already has influence in Muslim states, including Qatar, as well as in Africa and South America, through its observer membership in the Parliamentary Union of the OIC Member States (PUIC), the African Parliamentary Union (APU), the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC), and the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union.
As for LP4Q’s finances, NGO Monitor explained that the Turkey-based lobbying network is not transparent about its sources of funding, and the amounts related to its agreements remain undisclosed.
In 2021, LP4Q signed a “protocol cooperation” with a Turkish governmental institution, the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities. That same year, it agreed with the state-run news agency Anadolu “to engage and coordinate in order to serve the Palestinian and the cause of Jerusalem in the media and to confront the disinformation and falsification campaigns of the Israeli media machine.”
The Algemeiner reached out to LP4Q for comment for this story but did not receive a response.
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IDF Confirms Death of Hostage Shlomo Mansour, Murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7
Shlomo Mansour. Photo: courtesy
Israel announced on Tuesday its conclusion that one of the hostages slated for release in the current Gaza ceasefire deal died on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, recent intelligence confirmed that Hamas murdered Shlomo Mansour, 86, and took his body from his home in Kibbutz Kissufim to Gaza.
In a statement, Mansour’s family called him “the pillar of strength for our entire family” and “a man of high morals and values, a lover of humanity, who always helped others wholeheartedly.” They described Mansour as “a man with a heart of gold, golden hands, and a smile worth gold.”
Born in Baghdad, Mansour survived the 1941 Farhud pogrom which targeted Jews in Iraq’s capital. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that “during the two days of violence, rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes. The community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families — 15 percent of the Jewish community in Baghdad — suffered directly from the pogrom.”
Mansour, now the oldest hostage still in Gaza, immigrated to Israel at 13. He and his wife Mazel — who escaped during the Hamas attack — had five children and 12 grandchildren.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that “my wife Sarah and I extend our heartfelt condolences to the family of the late Shlomo Mansour, upon receiving the bitter news of his murder by the terrorist organization Hamas.”
Netanyahu called Mansour “one of the builders of the country and the founders of Kibbutz Kissufim. He survived the Farhud riots in Iraq in his youth. During the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas murderers on Oct. 7, he was murdered and kidnapped to Gaza. We share in the family’s deep grief. We will not rest or be silent until he is returned to the grave of Israel. We will continue to act resolutely and tirelessly until we return all of our hostages — both living and dead. May his memory be blessed.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a statement that he sends “all my support and strength to the Mansour family and the community of Kibbutz Kissufim, who have received the bitter and painful news of the murder of Shlomo Mansour, who was taken hostage on Oct. 7.”
Herzog stated that “about a month ago, I had the privilege of meeting his incredible family and hearing from them about their beloved Shlomo, who survived the Farhud pogrom against Baghdad’s Jews in 1941, only to be brutally abducted from his home in Kissufim at the age of 86. They fought with all their might for his return throughout a year and four months of hell and pain, clinging in hope and prayer for his fate.”
Describing Mansour as “a talented carpenter, a modest and kind-hearted family and community man who radiated warmth and love to all those around him,” Herzog said that “we will continue to do everything in our power to bring Shlomo home to be laid to rest in dignity, and to bring back all our hostages — both the living and the fallen — until the very last one.”
Mansour’s family advocated in their statement for “decision-makers to make a brave and ethical decision to bring all hostages home immediately — the living for rehabilitation and the deceased for proper burial in their homeland.”
The American Jewish Committee said in a statement responding to Mansour’s murder that “we weep with his family, his kibbutz, and all of Israel today. May his memory be a blessing.”
The European Jewish Congress stated that “we will continue doing everything in our power to bring Shlomo home for a dignified burial and to return all our hostages — both the living and the fallen — until the last one is brought back. May his memory be a blessing.”
The Anti-Defamation League responded that Mansour “endured unimaginable tragedies yet was deeply loved by his family and community. For over a year, his loved ones clung to the cruel hope he was alive. We mourn this heartbreaking loss and send our deepest condolences to his family. May his memory be a blessing.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum, told Sky News Australia following confirmation of Mansour’s death that “there is no depths, no ends to the depravity, the cruelty and the monstrous evil of Hamas. They spare no one. From a Holocaust survivor, 86-year-old Shlomo Mansour whom they took hostage from his home, to the youngest of hostages, a 9-month-old baby, to women and the elderly — no one is spared by their evil. There is no end to that.”
Hamas announced on Monday its plan to suspend the planned releases of further hostages, accusing the Jewish state of violating the ceasefire agreement — charges which Israel denies.
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