RSS
Cornell professor apologizes for saying he was ‘exhilarated’ by Hamas attack, as campus Israel battles continue
(JTA) – A Cornell University professor has apologized after saying at a rally that he was “exhilarated” by Hamas’ terror attack on Israel, in the latest example of American university faculty caught up in heated rhetoric over Israel and Gaza on college campuses.
The apology by Russell Rickford, a history professor, was published the same day as another apology from a different university professor in Chicago over her own anti-Israel social media comments.
Both appear to have been prompted by condemnations from their respective university presidents, which came as donors have pulled support from other elite universities over their perceived failure to sufficiently or promptly condemn the attacks.
During the two weeks since the massacre, several other professors have made comments perceived as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas, and some have faced public pressure campaigns as a result. Students at Harvard, New York University and Columbia University who signed onto anti-Israel statements in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks have also had job offers rescinded and in some cases, seen their names spread as part of doxxing campaigns led by pro-Israel groups.
“I apologize for the horrible choice of words that I used in a portion of a speech that was intended to stress grassroots African American, Jewish and Palestinian traditions of resistance to oppression,” Rickford wrote in a statement published in the campus newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. “I recognize that some of the language I used was reprehensible and did not reflect my values.”
Rickford made his initial comments during an Oct. 15 pro-Palestinian rally on the Ithaca, New York, campus. Standing in front of banners arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, he announced, “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence” and “shifted the balance of power,” in reference to the terror group’s Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, wounded thousands and took some 200 hostages. “It was exhilarating. It was energizing.”
Claiming that even “Palestinians of conscience” were “able to breathe for the first time in years,” Rickford continued, “And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”
Initially Rickford had defended his remarks from Jewish and Israeli students’ criticism, saying he was referring to “those first few hours” when the Hamas militants first breached the Gaza barrier and before the full scope of their attacks on Israelis had become known.
“In that context, this act of defiance, of boring across the wall, was a significant symbol,” he told the Daily Sun. “It really signaled that the Palestinian will to resist had not been broken. In subsequent days, we learned of some of the horrifying realities.”
But opposition was also mounting at the highest levels of Cornell’s administration. The university’s president and board of trustees harshly condemned Rickford’s comments in a pair of statements.
“This is a reprehensible comment that demonstrates no regard whatsoever for humanity,” president Martha Pollack and board chair Kraig Kayser said in a statement Tuesday that named Rickford specifically and hinted that the administration might look into disciplining him. That followed an earlier statement from Pollack that did not name Rickford but stated, “I am sickened by statements glorifying the evilness of Hamas terrorism. Any members of our community who have made such statements do not speak for Cornell; in fact, they speak in direct opposition to all we stand for at Cornell.”
Rickford’s apology did not specify what part of his speech he was apologizing for. According to the Daily Sun, the professor has a history of pro-Palestinian activism, including at rallies protesting racism and other issues.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Claudia Tenney both said Friday that they believed Cornell should fire Rickford. “As a person of authority at an educational institution, to celebrate murder, rape and abducting children and slaughtering children, I think he should be fired,” Gillibrand told CNY Central. Tenney made the request in a letter to Pollack that she also released publicly.
On the same day that Rickford apologized, Mika Tosca, a climate scientist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also apologized for an Instagram post that contained harsh anti-Israel sentiments.
“Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” Tosca had written Tuesday, nine days after the massacre and in the midst of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, according to a screenshot shared by the New York Post. “The propaganda has been downright evil. After the past week, if your eyes aren’t open to the crimes against humanity that Israel is committing and has committed for decades, and will continue to commit, then I suggest you open them.” She concluded, “May they all rot in hell.”
Her post, like Rickford’s, prompted a denunciation from her employer. “One member of our community expressed views on their personal social media account—views that are not reflective of the School or the values we as a community share—causing distress among those both within and beyond our campus,” SAIC president Elissa Tenny wrote in a statement Wednesday. “The School of the Art Institute of Chicago rejects such hateful views, and I want to clarify our values as an educational community.”
In a lengthy apology posted to Instagram that same day, Tosca said she was “deeply sorry for writing what I wrote.”
“I am especially sorry to Israeli people that I broadly placed at fault for the war,” she continued. “You did not — and do not — deserve that, and I was wrong to post what I posted; I know that my words perpetuated harmful stereotypes.”
Rickford and Tosca’s apologies come as university faculty around the country have posted inflammatory statements about Israel. Yale University American studies professor Zareen Grewal tweeted on the day of Hamas’ attacks that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” An online petition started by the family of a Jewish Yale student to pressure the university to remove her has racked up more than 53,000 signatures, but the university has not commented on her statements.
Another American studies professor, Jemma Decristo at the University of California, Davis, appeared to threaten “Zionist journalists” on social media. Decristo reportedly posted Oct. 10 on X, “one group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation,” adding, “they have houses, addresses, kids in school” and concluding with machete, ax and bloodrop emojis. “They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more,” she wrote.
Decristo has made her social media accounts private since screenshots of the post began to spread on Thursday. UC Davis has yet to respond to the post, although Decristo’s staff page was no longer visible Thursday. The school’s president had posted a statement supporting “our Jewish and Muslim communities” on the same day as Decristo’s post.
And Columbia University is fiercely divided over how to respond to a tenured Middle East studies professor, Joseph Massad, who penned a piece for the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada the day after the Hamas attacks describing them as “innovative,” a “major achievement,” and a source of “jubilation and awe.” A student-led petition to remove Massad had reportedly amassed 47,000 signatures this week, although it was not visible as of Thursday; in response, several hundred students, faculty, alumni and “affiliates” of the university signed an open letter backing Massad’s “academic freedom.”
Columbia was also one of a handful of universities where student organizations signed letters blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks, and last week the university was the site of an assault on an Israeli student.
—
The post Cornell professor apologizes for saying he was ‘exhilarated’ by Hamas attack, as campus Israel battles continue appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Eurosatory Organizers to Appeal Court Ban on Israeli Companies
An Elbit Systems Ltd. Hermes 900 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is seen at the company’s drone factory in Rehovot, Israel, June 28, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Orel Cohen
i24 News – The organizers of Eurosatory, a prominent defense exhibition slated to commence from Monday in France, have announced their intention to appeal a recent court decision barring Israeli arms companies from participating.
Coges Events, the company overseeing the event, expressed dissatisfaction following a ruling by the Bobigny court, which also extended the ban to intermediaries facilitating Israeli arms sales.
Originally planning to host 74 Israeli firms among the 2,000 exhibitors, Eurosatory faced legal action from several NGOs, including Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) and Al-Haq, seeking to halt Israeli participation. Their petition, filed after the French government initially canceled Israeli arms manufacturers’ involvement on May 31 in response to events in Rafah, was upheld by the court.
In response, Coges Events issued a statement asserting that the court’s decision went beyond the government’s directive and imposed broader restrictions than anticipated.
The ruling not only prohibits Israeli companies but also bars exhibitors from promoting Israeli weapons or engaging with Israeli representatives at their stands.
The post Eurosatory Organizers to Appeal Court Ban on Israeli Companies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Lukashenko Accused of Antisemitism Following Controversial Remarks
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko holds a news conference in Minsk, Belarus August 9, 2021. Pavel Orlovsky/BelTA/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has lodged a formal protest against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, following his controversial remarks suggesting that Jews “steal without thinking.”
During a recent meeting on corruption, Lukashenko stated, “There is a list of 30 suspects here. Forgive me, I’m not antisemitic, but more than half of the accused are Jewish.”
He further commented, “What’s going on here? Have they [the Jews] assumed a special privileged status? Stealing and not thinking about their future? In Belarus, everyone is equal before the law. Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, and also Poles. Everyone.”
The remarks prompted a swift response from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yuval Fuchs, Deputy Director of Eurasia and the Western Balkans at the ministry, summoned the Belarusian Ambassador to express Israel’s disapproval. Fuchs stated that “the statement made by the President of Belarus is unacceptable, outrageous, and sounds like a definite antisemitic comment.”
This is not the first time Lukashenko has made controversial comments about Jews.
Last December, he praised Armenia by claiming its people are intelligent because there are no Jews among them.
“If Armenia wants to die economically, we might lose it. But I don’t think that the Armenians are stupid people. Armenians are smart people. After all, there isn’t even a single Jew there. Do you know why? Because Armenians are the smartest people,” Lukashenko said.
Contrary to his claims, Armenia does have a Jewish community, numbering around 400 members, and generally enjoys positive relations with the authorities.
The post Lukashenko Accused of Antisemitism Following Controversial Remarks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
How António Guterres Betrayed the Jews
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York City, US, before a meeting about the conflict in Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
JNS.org – Back in February, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a speech at the Ohel Jakob synagogue in Munich in which he struck most of the right notes.
Guterres acknowledged what Israel’s most diehard adversaries never will—that the Jewish people are indigenous to the historic Land of Israel. “I was in Masada,” he said. “And I lived the feeling of the Jewish people about the expulsion of the Roman Empire in the first century and how the Jewish community has spread in the Roman Empire but, since the beginning, became in the different areas of the empire, victims of different forms of segregation, discrimination and persecution.”
Antisemitism, Guterres also observed, “was not born with the Nazis and did not die with the Nazis.” Referring to his native Portugal, which expelled its Jewish population at the beginning of the 16th century, the U.N. chief bemoaned this “criminal” and “stupid” act for causing suffering to Jews and impoverishing the country culturally and economically. And, he continued, “antisemitism is unfortunately spreading today. It has had, I would say, a clear acceleration since the horrific attacks of Hamas on the seventh of October, but it was already a central concern for us in the last decades. We have seen how it was multiplying both online and offline with all kinds of manifestations, desecration of cemeteries, personal attacks on people, vicious actions online, and worst, an attempt to rewrite history.”
All of this is in keeping with Guterres’s previous comments on the issue, including his determination in 2017 that the “denial of Israel’s right to exist is antisemitism,” which is an enormously significant statement for the head of the world’s most thoroughly and consistently anti-Israel body. Additionally, during the coronavirus pandemic, Guterres spoke out more than once against the antisemitic memes that spread like wildfire in the “covidiocy” camp of anti-vaxxers and allied conspiracy theorists.
Yet there is one aspect of this issue on which he has remained silent. And that is the antisemitism that stains the organization he leads.
When Guterres rightly identified calls for Israel’s elimination as antisemitism—a contention that has been proven ad nauseam in the months since the Oct. 7 pogrom—it would have been natural for him, intellectually speaking, to examine how the United Nations has contributed to legitimizing this demand. In 1975, at the behest of the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution decrying Zionism as a form of racism, already established as a staple of Soviet propaganda. In the same year, the United Nations created a Division for Palestinian Rights dedicated to promoting and amplifying the themes in that resolution. Alongside this network is a so-called humanitarian agency, UNRWA, which is solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants. No other dispossessed or persecuted people, inside or outside the Middle East, has been handed the same privilege. UNRWA has certainly risen to the occasion, spreading antisemitic ideology in the schools it runs and even employing Palestinians who participated in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Then you have the U.N. Human Rights Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to vilifying Israel, and which periodically pushes out ugly, unsubstantiated attacks on Israel through the guise of “independent experts.” One such report was released just last week by a team of three commissioners, one of whom, Miloon Kothari, famously accused the “Jewish Lobby” of controlling social media (if only, eh?)
In an environment like this one, it’s hardly surprising that Israel now finds itself on a blacklist with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen as states whose militaries systemically abuse children. Yet what is noteworthy here is that this list is provided by Guterres’ own office, which produces the annual “Children in Armed Conflict” report.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also made the list, rubbing salt into the wound by equating Israel’s military with a bunch of murderers, rapists and deviants who derive pleasure from mutilating the dead and similarly bestial acts. Again, there is nothing remarkable about the world body drawing such a grotesque comparison. What is noteworthy is that it carries the endorsement of Guterres, who goes out of his way to portray himself as an ally of Jews when he speaks to Jewish audiences, but then doggedly sticks to the anti-Zionist script once he returns to Turtle Bay.
Because if Guterres really did believe in the points he made during his Munich speech, then he would not have assented to Israel’s inclusion on the blacklist. If he really appreciated the centrality of Israel as an anchor of security for Jews the world over, if he really grasped the mass trauma provoked by Oct. 7 for Israelis and Jews around the world alike, if he really knew in every fiber of his being that the Jewish people have only this one country that is currently facing a campaign of deadly violence orchestrated by Iran and its regional proxies, then Israel would not be sharing space with militaries whose sole raison d’être is the murder, torture and wholesale destruction of innocent civilians.
That is why Jews have every right to feel betrayed by Guterres. At least his predecessors, who included the late Austrian Nazi Kurt Waldheim, never raised our expectations and never cheated us into thinking that the United Nations was changing direction on Israel. Guterres dangled precisely that hope and then snatched it away.
Now he has lent his imprimatur to one of the worst antisemitic blood libels to emerge from the halls of the United Nations—and there have been many. The twisted logic that places Israel on such a list could easily be applied to the United States, the United Kingdom and France—all permanent U.N. Security Council members whose militaries have faced war-crime charges in countries like Algeria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But only Israel faces this treatment because targeting the Jewish state has become routinized and normalized in the U.N. setting.
That will only change when a successor to Guterres honestly appraises the world body’s own record of antisemitism and pledges to end it, first of all by dismantling all the elements—the committees, the various “independent” commissions, the anti-Israel agenda items set in stone—that contribute to this institutional bias. Only then can Jews gain any kind of trust in the United Nations. And that, for the foreseeable future, isn’t going to happen.
The post How António Guterres Betrayed the Jews first appeared on Algemeiner.com.