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‘Everyone in Danger’: Concordia University Refuses to Investigate, Punish Antisemitic Assault and Harassment, Students Say
Illustrative: Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters, primarily university students, rally at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on Oct. 28, 2023. Photo by Sayed Najafizada/NurPhoto
Jewish students at Concordia University in Montreal must fend for themselves when their anti-Zionist classmates resort to assault and harassment on campus, according to students who spoke with The Algemeiner.
No single incident, they said, evinced their alleged abandonment by school officials more than one on March 12 in which Jewish students were trapped in the school’s Hillel office while members of the anti-Zionist club Supporting Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), concealing their faces with keffiyehs and surgical masks, banged on its windows and doors and stomped on the floor of the room above it.
“It’s usually just a safe place for Jewish people to come and hang out,” Chana Leah Natanblut, president of Chabad Concordia, said of the Hillel office. “We were all doing our work and chilling, and all of a sudden we started hearing chanting, like screaming and stuff. We thought maybe it had something with the student strike going on, but then we started hearing people scream terrorists and banging on the ceiling. The Supporting Palestinian Human Rights club is directly above us.”
Seeking the source of the din exploding around them, Natanblut and her friends walked to the window, where they saw a crush of SPHR activists, some standing on the fire escape outside of it, others standing in the parking lot below.
“B—ch!” “Dog!” “Zionism is terrorism!” they screamed, while the person on the fire escape whacked away at the window. The rioters came from “all sides,” Natanblut explained, sprinting through the hallways to hammer the walls outside the club and setting off what felt like seismic shocks that shook the room. Amid the clatter, Natanblut noticed that a shopping bag hooked on a wall mount behind the door was swinging like a pendulum, as if to count down the time they had left before the worst occurred.
“We immediately locked the window and made sure that the door to the room was locked,” Natanblut continued. “We really felt trapped, and I couldn’t even leave to use the bathroom. I was wondering how would I get out and if I would be attacked if I did. So, I started to videotape what was going on, and I called my friend, the person in charged of advocacy for Hillel, telling him to come right away. Then I called security.”
Security arrived promptly, Natanblut said, and reprimanded the SPHR rioters. However, to Natanblut’s astonishment, they refused to discipline those involved in the disturbance on the grounds that Jewish students had contributed to instigating the incident.
According to Natanblut, the SPHR students told the officers that they behaved as they did because the Jewish students had filmed them. To no avail, Natanblut and her friends explained that they only began recording after the banging and screaming started and that they had all been minding their own business. Declining to privilege one account of what happened over the other, security took their statements and left, refusing to answer questions about next steps, including whether the rioters would be allowed back in the building.
“We only filmed because they were harassing us, for evidence, and we didn’t feel safe,” Natanblut said. “Security obviously told them to disperse and that they couldn’t act that way, but they didn’t say what would happen and it felt almost as if they had taken their side. Who’s to say they won’t do it again? What kind of message does it send to do nothing about it?”
Similar occurrences are the new normal for Jewish students attending Concordia University, Anastasia Zorchinsky, founder and president of The StartUp Nation, a pro-Israel club, told The Algemeiner. On Nov. 8, for example, just over a month after Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel, anti-Zionist protesters approached Jewish students and punched several in the face. No one was punished for these offenses, she explained, and the university has had the habit of refusing to denounce antisemitism as a stand-alone problem, always being sure to mention Islamophobia as well to insinuate that Jewish students are engaging in hateful behavior themselves. With several large anti-Zionist events coming up later this month and in April, she fears Jewish students will be targeted again and denied justice.
“The university must enforce its policies, which it’s not doing,” Zorchinsky said. “There’s a clear double standard when it comes to violence against Jewish students, and there must be investigations of these students and expulsions of any found to have committed antisemitic violence. We don’t need pro-Hamas students on our campus behaving this way. We don’t need students who support terrorism on campus. They’re a danger to everyone. Not just us.”
Concordia University did not respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Everyone in Danger’: Concordia University Refuses to Investigate, Punish Antisemitic Assault and Harassment, Students Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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