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Cannes Film Festival Takes Extra Security Precautions to Prevent Disruptions by Anti-Israel Protesters

Greta Gerwig, Jury President of the 77th Cannes Film Festival interacts with fans while arriving at the Hotel Martinez on the eve of the opening of the 77th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yara Nardi

Ahead of the opening night of the 77th Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, organizers opened up about security measures being taken to protect jurors and festival-goers from anti-Israel activists and protesters who might try to cause havoc at the event.

“This year, we’ve had 15 security briefings compared with only four or five last year, so I can tell you it’s a very serious matter,” Cannes Film Festival General Secretary Francois Desrousseaux said at a pre-festival press conference, as reported by Variety. “We also have AI-powered cameras around the Palais for the first time, and we’ve also starting using new AI safety gates.”

The festival is taking extra steps this year to prevent activists from causing unrest that could disrupt the event, which is what happened at the recent Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden. Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators took to the streets of Malmo to protest Israel’s participation in the international competition and even protested outside the hotel of Israeli contestant Eden Golan. Her performances in the Eurovision semifinals and grand finals were also booed by pro-Palestinian supporters in the audience, one of whom waved a Palestinian flag and as a result was escorted out of the venue. Golan ultimately finished the Eurovision Song Contest in fifth place.

The short film “It’s Not Time For Pop” by Amit Vaknin is the only film from Israel taking part in the Cannes Film Festival this year. It will compete in the La Cinéf section, which highlights projects from film schools.

At the press conference before the festival’s opening night, Cannes Film Festival Director Thierry Frémaux was asked about a possible threat of anti-Israel protests disrupting the festival and why no Israeli films are in the main competition this year. He replied, “The selection is based on the films we see. It’s an artistic choice, made independently of anything that doesn’t have to do with cinema.”

Organizers of the Cannes Film Festival have also hired private security personnel to follow jurors of the competition — which include Greta Gerwig, Eva Green, and Lily Gladstone — to keep activists from getting near them, Variety noted. The festival additionally announced that it will not participate in the distribution of pins that show support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and also pins that pay tribute to the hostages taken by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 that remain in captivity.

“There is no polemic this year,” said Frémaux. “There are polemics outside the festival, but they do not come from the festival.”

The city of Cannes banned protests along the Croisette and its surrounding areas during the 11-day film festival, which will take place from May 14-25. The Israeli Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival is expected to remain open and the annual Shabbat dinner in Cannes for members of the film industry will also take place as planned, its organizer Gadi Wildstron told Variety.

“In 2014, when there was another war in in Gaza, and we had a Shabbat dinner at the kosher restaurant called Tovo,” Wildstrom told the publication. “And the French army blocked off the road and were standing at both sides of the street with machine guns. The French are unlike the American authorities and European authorities. They don’t accept anything.”

The post Cannes Film Festival Takes Extra Security Precautions to Prevent Disruptions by Anti-Israel Protesters first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada

Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid on Nov. 14. The raid was conducted […]

The post Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims

Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, US, March 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer

President-elect Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of the votes in New York City (NYC) precincts that were at least a quarter Jewish, according to a data analysis by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a prominent Washington DC-based political group.

RJC presented data on Friday affirming the notion that Trump won a higher proportion of the NYC Jewish vote than in previous elections, potentially signaling an ideological shift in the traditionally-liberal voting bloc. According to RJC data, Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25%.

Trump’s 2024 performance among Jews in NYC seems to mark a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections, contests in which the president-elect struggled to make inroads among Jewish voters. 

Voting data from the 2024 election also indicate that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily-Jewish enclaves of deep-blue cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively. 

Trump’s increased success among Jewish voters in the Big Apple comes amid simmering anger over surging antisemitism across the country.

In the year following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel, college campuses have become embroiled in an unrelenting onslaught of protests opposing the Jewish state. Moreover, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that the president has not been a firm ally of the Jewish state. 

Over the past year, NYC has been ravaged with raucous, often-violent anti-Israel demonstrations and an unrelenting spate of antisemitic hate crimes.

Columbia University, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, became a poster-child for the anti-Israel campus movement, erecting encampments and holding protests calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Many NYC public schools came embroiled in scandal after teachers presented students with lesson plans that accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians. 

Though most national Democrats continue to express support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, some figures in the party have, over the past year, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.

High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.

Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them once he retains office in January. 

Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.

 

 

The post Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge

Screenshot of masked men who attempted to rob Jewish man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Thursday. Photo: Screenshot

The Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York was the target of another attack on Thursday evening, as three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood.

Footage of the incident was shared on X/Twitter by Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit. It shows the men, whose faces were concealed by hoods and ski masks, chasing the man into the street and through the neighborhood after attempting to accost him.

No arrests have been made.

“He doesn’t give in easily, and I don’t think they got anything,” Behrman tweeted. “The Jewish Future Alliance is deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”

The explosion of an antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has set the Orthodox Jewish community on edge in recent weeks.

Last Tuesday, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. According to multiple accounts, the assailants were two Black teenagers.

That incident was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. Before then, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.

Most recently, a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. Police later identified the man as Stephan Stowe, 28 — a suspect gang member with an extensive criminal history which includes 33 prior arrests — and charged arrested him attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.

In each case, the suspect was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.

Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”

The problem has become acute in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.

According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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