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At the University of North Carolina, Teachers Attack Israel with the Lie of ‘Genocide’ and Students Threaten Violence
In May, Students for Justice in Palestine poured red paint which resembles spilled blood on the steps of the South Building, an office for administrative staff and the chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Photo: UNCSJP/Screenshot
The 2024-25 school year has recently begun at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where faculty members and students are continuing their anti-Israel activism and indoctrination.
In an email promoting a Sept. 6 event titled “Teach Palestine,” Nadia Yaqub — Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies –wrote to her fellow UNC academics: “As the genocide against the people of Gaza continues, many of us feel we cannot proceed with our teaching as if nothing is going on.”
The event flier asks, “Are you concerned by the ongoing genocide in Gaza? Are you looking for ways to bring Gaza or Palestine/Palestinians in general into your courses?”
In her email about the event, Yaqub added, “The workshop is open to faculty, staff, and graduate students from across the university, and we hope to present ideas and strategies that are applicable in any field.”
According to Yaqub’s email, all fields at UNC — such as mathematics, computer sciences, and speech-language pathology, just to name a few — should or can be used to focus on events in Gaza.
Community members I have spoken with expressed concern that Yaqub is clearly trying to stop students from getting a proper education in their respective fields in order to promote her political agenda.
Multiple sources report that donors and community members are outraged, and are contacting UNC with concerns about institutional bias and classroom activism. Many wonder if this planned workshop will fall outside of North Carolina state law on institutional neutrality, which clearly specifies, “The constituent institution shall remain neutral, as an institution, on the political controversies of the day.”
On Sept. 1, 2024, the UNC Campus Y promoted the “Teach Palestine” workshop on social media. They posted the flier the very same day the world learned the devastating news that six Israeli civilians had been executed by Hamas in Gaza. The Campus Y post did not mention those murders, and seems to be a clear signal that the Campus Y does not care about or consider Jewish life and suffering.
In Nov. of 2023, the Campus Y published a “A Solidarity Statement with Palestine.” The statement begins:
We, as the executive board of the Campus Y, stand in solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora in their struggle for land and freedom from settler colonialism. We reject the idea that recent eruptions of violence are indicative of a ‘conflict,’ and uphold that they are indicative of pushback to the Israeli government’s oppression and genocidal erasure of Palestinian people and land, an ongoing process since the 1948 Palestine War and the Nakba.
The statement added: “We would like to emphasize that the Y remains a safe space for all students to decompress; particularly our Arab, Muslim, and especially Palestinian communities.”
The solidarity statement also promised that the Campus Y would continue collaborating with the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (UNC-SJP) which is pro-Hamas. Referring to this now suspended chapter as pro-Hamas is not hyperbole; it is factual.
On Oct. 7 — when Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — UNC-SJP proclaimed on social media: “It is our moral obligation to be in solidarity with the dispossessed, no matter the pathway to liberation they choose to take. This includes violence.”
On Oct. 12, UNC-SJP held a “Day of Resistance Protest for Palestine” on campus. The event flier celebrated terrorism by featuring a Hamas paraglider en route to kill Israelis and commit other atrocities. In a widely circulated video, a protester screamed, “All of us Hamas.”
I interviewed two Jewish students who silently counter-protested that day. They told me that they were approached by activists who allegedly brandished knives.
In 2020, the Campus Y supported a boycott of an upcoming Hillel trip. The Executive Board of the Campus Y stated that they “voted to sign onto the petition started by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to boycott the Hillel Perspectives trip, which sends student leaders from UNC’s campus on a fully funded spring break trip to multiple cities in Israel and Occupied Palestine.”
Towards the end of last school year, the Campus Y was briefly closed by the university due to safety concerns. Sources tell me that campus officials were concerned that the Campus Y was being kept open late, past closing hours, to support the anti-Israel protesters in ways such as providing bathrooms to those in the encampment.
Over the summer, UNC-SJP made national news when they announced their support of “armed rebellion” and “revolutionary violence.”
In a manifesto from late July, UNC-SJP proclaimed, “We emphasize our support for the right to resistance, not only in Palestine, but also here in the imperial core. We condone all forms of principled action, including armed rebellion.”
UNC-SJP also made an ominous social media post that some community members and faculty feel is a threat. The suspended chapter wrote, “The time has run out for peace policing … In this hour we urge all people of conscience to heed Palestinians’ calls to escalate autonomously and without reservation.”
Sources tell me that the State Bureau of Investigation has been asked to investigate the potential threats from these UNC-SJP statements.
In addition, on Aug. 24, the Chapel Hill Courthouse near campus was vandalized with graffiti saying “Kill Cops,” “Jihad Now,” and “Death to Cops.”
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
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