With the Jewish community still reeling from the recent violent assaults on Jewish individuals in Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, it is deeply troubling to see ongoing efforts by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to partner and forge coalitions with the very groups who have been fueling a broader climate of incitement against Jews and Israel.

As Jewish educational professionals who have worked in academia, we are deeply disturbed by the AAUP’s decision to not only embrace anti-Israel groups, but to give them a seat at the table — to the exclusion of Jewish voices.

The latest development on this front is the AAUP’s launch of its “Organize Every Campus” campaign, including a Summer Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta in July. While details remain vague, the exclusionary tone of earlier events, such as the April 17 “National Day of Action,” which promoted a disturbing range of anti-Israel activity, raises doubts that these programs will be welcoming to Jewish members.

At over 200+ campuses nationwide, the AAUP has turned protests against what it described as government overreach into events that marginalized its own Jewish members, many of whom view their connection to Israel as very important.

In the name of protecting academic freedom, the AAUP has partnered with organizations whose rhetoric and activism drives Jewish and pro-Israel faculty and students to the margins.

How exclusion is being built into AAUP’s machinery

Exclusion is being manifested in AAUP’s structure in several ways. First, the organization made a formal retreat from its decades-long taboo on academic boycotts.

Last summer, the AAUP abandoned its categorical opposition to boycotting academic institutions and scholars — an about-face that implicitly validated embargoes on Israeli academics and on anyone unwilling to denounce Israel. The reversal risks eroding intellectual exchange across higher education and further exacerbates the shunning of Israeli scholars.

Second, the group has presented one-sided programming that demonizes Israel. On March 6, the association promoted a webinar titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” charging that Israel aims to eradicate Palestinian education.

Five mainstream Jewish and academic bodies — ADL, AEN, AJC, Hillel, and JFNA — wrote to the AAUP leadership, urging them to host a balanced follow-up program and to train staff on antisemitism. Ten weeks later, there has not even been a courtesy acknowledgment of the letter’s receipt.

Third, AAUP is partnering with groups — including JVP, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine — whose record is openly hateful to Israelis and their supporters. In its recent campus campaign, the AAUP has demonstrated that it is only interested in engaging with virulently anti-Israel groups that, ironically, work against the very academic principles of open inquiry and academic freedom that the AAUP and its “National Day of Action” claims to champion.

AAUP placed its own logo beside these anti-Israel groups’ logos on every flyer, giving them and their stances legitimacy. The downloadable toolkit from the campaign’s website urged professors to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” stage “die-ins,” and “target any senator” deemed friendly to Israel.

Faculty who believe in Israel’s right to exist — or who simply oppose its demonization and delegitimization — were told, implicitly but unmistakably, to stay away. What’s coming this summer and fall could be even more divisive if the AAUP refuses to heed these concerns and continues down a path that sidelines Jewish voices rather than includes them.

Why this matters for scholarship

In our experience engaging with many faculty and staff members on US campuses, we have debated ideas that we strongly disliked — it was this intellectual exchange, not boycott, that has sharpened our thinking.

Israeli academics — drawn from a country of roughly 10 million people in a Middle East–North Africa region of about 500 million, barely two percent of the area’s population — contribute indispensably to physics labs, philosophy colloquia, and medical breakthroughs. Silencing their voices and preventing US-based academics from working and exchanging ideas with them impoverishes us all.

The AAUP once stood sentinel against such suppression. Today it risks becoming just another ideological guild, one that blesses intellectual embargoes as long as the target is Israel.

A constructive way forward for the AAUP would be to:

• Acknowledge the growing alienation of its Jewish and Zionist members and respond publicly to the March 6 coalition letter.
• Revisit its recent policy change regarding academic boycotts and provide opportunities for its many members who oppose these tactics to highlight how academic boycotts violate the freedom, intellectual exchange, and open inquiry that the AAUP was founded to defend.
• Better vet and screen potential coalition partners: no group that equates Zionists with Nazis or calls for Israel’s destruction should be featured alongside the AAUP masthead.
• Offer robust antisemitism education for staff and chapter officers.

Academic freedom can never truly be advanced when one community is forced to check its identity at the door to participate.

If the AAUP truly stands for intellectual freedom, it must stop enabling the ideological silencing of Jewish and Zionist faculty.

Andrew Goretsky is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League – Philadelphia. Raeefa Z. Shams is the Director of Communications and Programming at the Academic Engagement Network.

The post ‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

This past week has been nothing short of historic. On June 12–13, Israel launched its first strikes deep inside Iran, targeting the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and multiple other sites tied to the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

In addition, Israel conducted precision strikes against leading Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists, effectively decapitating Iran’s senior military command and scientific elite, seriously hampering Iranian efforts to respond.

Prime Minister Netanyahu called it a preemptive move against an existential threat. Iran responded with missile attacks of its own, breaching Israel’s much-vaunted air defenses and hitting residential areas, including a hospital in Beersheba.

And now — just days after this all began — President Trump has signaled his possible readiness to involve America directly in a war that, until recently, most believed was still more fantasy than reality. As I write these words, the situation remains highly fluid. By the time you read this, American B-2 bombers could have already dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Iran’s most deeply buried nuclear facility.

But while military pundits and geopolitical analysts have been working overtime, parsing missiles and political statements, I’ve been thinking about something almost no one is addressing: What explains Iran’s religious stubbornness in the face of overwhelming hatred for its regime — both at home and abroad? Where is the reality check? Where is the ability to set aside ideological absolutism and protect the people of Iran?

Here is a country whose economy is in ruins, whose streets are teeming with young people who openly despise the ruling clerics, and whose neighbors — Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE — have shifted from cold neutrality to quiet coordination with Israel, united by a shared fear of Iran’s reckless ambitions.

The Islamic Republic is isolated, reviled, and increasingly cornered. And yet, its leaders plow ahead with terrifying conviction — as if righteousness alone will shield them from the consequences of their actions.

The answer is this, and it’s chilling: they genuinely believe they’re doing God’s will. And once someone believes that — with absolute certainty — they become very, very dangerous.

To understand this intransigence, you must go back to 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile — inexplicably enabled by France and US President Jimmy Carter — and ignited the Islamic Revolution.

Unlike Gamal Abdel Nasser, the secular nationalist leader of Egypt, who envisioned a pan-Arab future bound by language and culture, Khomeini offered something far more radical and dangerous: a transnational theocracy. In Khomeini’s worldview, there was no such thing as a “Persian” identity. There was only Islam — and only those committed to his uncompromising Shi’a vision of it.

“We do not worship Iran,” he declared. “We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism.” In other words, faith erased nationhood. Resistance to the regime’s theology wasn’t merely political dissent — it was apostasy. And apostasy, in a system like Khomeini’s, is punishable by death.

Khomeini didn’t want to be the president of Iran, he wanted to be the guardian of a global Islamic revolution – a return to the early days of Islam when the Prophet Muhammad’s successors swept across the Middle East and beyond, to conquer with the sword and forced conversions.

The Iranian revolution was never meant to stop at Iran’s borders. In fact, borders were an annoying inconvenience. From the very beginning, the goal was to export this fundamentalist ideology — first to the Shi’a populations of Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain, and then to the wider Muslim world.

In that sense, Iran under Khomeini was less a state than a divine mission. The IRGC wasn’t merely a national military force — it was the revolutionary guard of a new Islamic order. And while his opponents talked about democracy and reform, Khomeini was focused on martyrdom, submission, and a mystical messianic destiny. He believed — as does his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — that if the regime stood firm in its theology, God would ensure its success, even against impossible odds.

This is the belief that animates Iran today. The leaders of the Islamic Republic are Khomeini’s ideological heirs, and they continue to behave as though religious certainty can substitute for military capability, economic solvency, or diplomatic credibility.

They believe they are right — and everyone else, including the entire global order, is wrong. And so, no matter what you throw at them, they persevere, they grandstand, they deny reality, and they wrap themselves in a cloak of religious righteousness, as if that alone will save them.

This delusional fusion of faith and fantasy is not new. In fact, according to several biblical commentators, it appears in Parshat Shlach, which tells the story of the twelve spies – meraglim – sent by Moses to scout the land of Canaan.

Ten of them return with a bleak, terrifying report: the land is unconquerable, and rather than embark on the conquest of the Promised Land, they insist the nation must remain in the wilderness. The people panic, and God responds by condemning that entire generation to die in the desert.

The commentaries debate the spies’ motives, with some suggesting that the meraglim were actually driven by religious conviction. According to the Sfas Emes, the meraglim were not defying God, rather they believed they were defending Him.

The meraglim were convinced that Torah could only be lived in the rarefied, otherworldly atmosphere of the desert — free from the political and material distractions that statehood would inevitably bring. They were not denying God’s plan — they were trying to improve on it. They were, in effect, trying to out-God Him.

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin takes it one step further. In his Pri Tzaddik commentary, he explains that the meraglim actually saw the future — they foresaw a decline in religious observance, followed by exile, suffering, and destruction — and they wanted to delay it.

In a sense, they were trying to protect the Jewish people from pain by rejecting history itself. But in doing so, they substituted their own vision for God’s will. It wasn’t prophecy — it was hubris dressed up as holiness.

Which brings us back to Iran. Just like the meraglim, Iran’s leaders genuinely believe they are carrying out a divine mandate: to preserve religious purity, to confront falsehood, and to build an Islamic world order. But in doing so, they defy not only international norms, but Divine moral norms as well.

For spirituality and faith to thrive, there must be space for human freedom — the freedom to err, to choose, to engage. True divine service requires grappling with the world, not fleeing from it. Iran’s extremism doesn’t align with God — it usurps Him. And just like the meraglim, that hubris is destined to fail. Because God’s plan for the world includes the messiness of engaging with those who don’t meet your standards, and with the divine image that resides in every human being.

In the mid-1990s, while studying at UCL in London, I wrote my Jewish history dissertation on the Dead Sea sectarians — Jewish religious absolutists who withdrew to Qumran to escape what they saw as the contaminating halachic flexibility of the Pharisees in Jerusalem. They viewed compromise as heresy and nuance as betrayal. Their community thrived briefly, but ultimately vanished without a trace — destroyed by its own inability to adapt, doomed by the very purity it so zealously protected.

The same fate now threatens the Islamic leadership of Iran. Blinded by ideological certainty, impervious to reality, they cling to a vision that can only end in ruin. Let us pray they don’t take their entire country down with them.

The author is a writer in Beverly Hills, California. 

The post Why Is the Iranian Regime Not Looking After the People of Iran? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

“One of the things that antisemitism does is, it creates coalitions,” Rabbi David Wolpe recently observed.

How ironic that he made this comment on the show of Theo Von, a right-wing podcaster who interviewed Trump during the 2024 election campaign. Some months later, upon his return from a trip to Qatar, Von suddenly felt the need to talk about the alleged “genocide” in Gaza, only to be quoted favorably in the hard-left music magazine Rolling Stone.

The far-right and the far-left have been coming together over antisemitism at least since 1961, when 10 members of the American Nazi Party attended a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally. Members of the NOI escorted the Nazis to front-row seats for a speech by Malcolm X, who was filling in for the originally scheduled speaker, Elijah Muhammad.

More recently, in 2019, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke called Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “the most important member of the US Congress” for her “Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupied Government].”

That same year, the shooter at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, left behind a manifesto that both embraced white supremacist ideology and incorporated tropes promoted by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and the anti-Israel BDS movement, such as the false claims that Jews had a “large role in every slave trade for the past two thousand years” or that Jews persecute “Christians of modern day Syria and Palestine.” In 2021, left-wing academics adopted the language of David Duke and of the Nazis when they accused Israel of “Jewish supremacy.”

So it shouldn’t really have been a huge surprise to see this marriage of convenience beginning to make its way into today’s free-for-all media landscape. Rolling Stone, whose political slant generally is hard left and whose coverage of Israel, as CAMERA has documented at length, is egregiously biased, gushed over Von:

On Tuesday [May 19], comedian and podcaster Theo Von — who promoted the president during his 2024 campaign and accompanied him on a trip to Qatar last week — said the U.S. was “complicit” in creating the horrors that were taking place in Gaza.

“It feels to me like it’s a genocide that’s happening while we’re alive here … in front of our lives. And I feel like I should say something,” Von said on this week’s episode of the This Past Weekend podcast….

Pope Leo and Von couldn’t be more different, but frustration with the lack of progress toward a sustained cease-fire in Gaza, and the looming threat of more devastation to the region, reflect sentiments both in the U.S. and abroad.

There was a similar love-fest between Dave Smith, the conservative libertarian comedian best known for spouting nonsense on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Krystal Ball, the hard-left host of the online political news show Breaking Point, on Monday. Once again, Dave Smith let loose a dizzying blitz of false information, including making the claim that Iran was in compliance with non-proliferation agreements.

Smith said, “we’re left in the position where you’re supposed to sit here and justify a sneak aggressive, preemptive attack, like somehow you’re supposed to feel like you’re the good guys in an absolute war of choice, against a country that does not have nuclear weapons … Iran is a member of the non-proliferation treaty….”

But despite Iran’s (partial) ratification of the NPT, there have long been concerns about its enrichment capabilities, its building of new nuclear facilities, and its lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, leading up to the June 12 declaration by the IAEA that Iran was out of compliance with its NPT obligations, just a day before Israel’s attack. After that report, Iran threatened to leave the NPT altogether (although it’s clear it was not complying with the treaty).

And yet, instead of pointing any of this out, Ball responded, “and they’re [Israel] a rogue nation attacking like six of their neighbors as we speak and are not part of the non-proliferation [treaty] and we’re supposed to be cool with that” — while Smith nodded in agreement. Later in the show, in what may have been the only accurate claim made on that program, Ball remarked, “that’s the Israel horseshoe, between you and me, Dave.”

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel functioned as a siren call to antisemites everywhere: “It’s open season on the Jews.” Not only has this signal been heeded by certain individuals from both the far-left and the far-right, but a media environment that has no guardrails provides ample opportunities for these two nefarious groups to come together over their ignorance-fueled bigotry.

Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, and frequently writes about antisemitism in the media.

The post How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.