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France, Spain Locked in Diplomatic Dispute Over Removal of French Jewish Teenagers From Flight
A Vueling aircraft approaches landing at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport, as Vueling employees prepare for strike, in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 2, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce
The forced removal of French Jewish teenagers from a flight in Spain has triggered political outrage in France, after their group leader was handcuffed by Spanish police and a government minister insulted the teens as “Israeli brats.”
French ministers Aurore Bergé and Benjamin Haddad have sharply criticized Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente’s comments and denounced the Spanish government’s overall response to the incident.
Earlier this week, Puente referred to the group of teenagers as “Israeli brats” in a post on X, which he quickly deleted after it went viral and sparked widespread condemnation.
The French ministers issued a strong rebuke of the remarks for “equating French children who were Jewish with Israeli citizens, as if this in any way justified the treatment they were subjected to.”
“At a time when antisemitic acts have been on the rise across Europe since the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, we call on Vueling [the airline of the flight in question] and the Spanish authorities to fully investigate and clarify the events,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
“We will never accept the normalization of antisemitism. We will always stand with our fellow citizens who suffer from antisemitic hatred, and we will never compromise,” the French officials continued.
Last week, a group of 50 French Jewish students was forcibly removed from a plane in Valencia — reportedly for singing in Hebrew — an incident that resulted in the arrest of their summer camp director, who has accused Spanish law enforcement officers of using excessive force against her.
According to her lawyer, she was left with bruises on her legs, arms, and body after being harshly handcuffed and placed in an arm lock.
“No action justified the disembarkation or the excessive and brutal use of force by the Civil Guard against the young woman, who has just been notified of 15 days of total incapacity to work,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
The Spanish low-cost airline Vueling denied the allegations, insisting the incident was not related to religion but rather that the group was causing a disruption.
In a statement, the airline asserted that the group was removed because of its members’ “highly combative attitude that was putting the safety of the flight at risk.”
After meeting with the group’s counselor on Tuesday, Bergé and Haddad said she denied the official version of events, emphasizing that the crew was hostile from the beginning and that the group’s removal and the Civil Guard’s response were unjustified.
The children, aged 10 to 15, are members of the Kineret Club — a summer camp for Jewish families run by the Matana charitable association — which had just concluded their trip in the coastal resort town of Sant Carles de la Ràpita, between Valencia and Barcelona.
According to local reports, the children were singing in Hebrew while boarding the plane to return home, which prompted a hostile response from the crew.
Witnesses reported that the group stopped singing at the crew’s request and complied quietly with boarding instructions, yet airport police still intervened and ordered them to disembark.
Other passengers on the plane who witnessed the incident reported that staff made antisemitic remarks toward the group, including one employee who allegedly referred to Israel as a “terrorist state.”
Last week, amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, French authorities reached out to the CEO of Vueling and the Spanish ambassador to France to assess whether the group was subjected to religious discrimination.
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Trump Administration Impounds $250 Million From UCLA, Citing Antisemitism
US President Donald Trump points a finger as he delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, July 31, 2025. Photo: Kent Nishimura via Reuters Connect
The Trump administration has confiscated a nine-figure sum in federal funds from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), citing numerous complaints of antisemitism on the campus — some of which the institution recently settled in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit.
The federal government impounded, according to various reports, some $250 million to punish the university’s alleged exposing Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. The move comes only a couple days after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
On Thursday, UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk, a descendant of Jews who left Germany in the 1930s, said the loss off funds is “a loss for America” while arguing that it will not help in addressing antisemitism.
“With this decision, hundreds of grants may be lost, adversely affecting the lives of and life-changing work of UCLA researchers, faculty, and staff. In its notice to us, the federal government claims antisemitism and bias as the reasons,” Frenk wrote in a message to the campus community. “This far-reaching penalty of defunding live-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination.”
He continued, “We share the goal of eradicating antisemitism across society. Antisemitism has no place on our campus, nor does any form of discrimination. We recognize that we can improve, and I am committed to doing so. Confronting the scourge of antisemitism effectively calls for thoughtfulness, commitment, and sustained effort — and UCLA has taken robust actions to make our campus a safe and welcoming environment for all students.”
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
Later, pro-Hamas activists erected a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on campus during the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester and chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it. UCLA allegedly refused to clear the encampment despite knowing what was happening there, prompting allegations that it allowed a “Jewish Exclusion Zone” on its property. The antisemitism complaint that was settled earlier this week argued that the university violated its own policies as well as “the basic guarantee of equal access to educational facilities that receive federal funding” and other equal protection laws.
On Tuesday, the university announced that it agreed to pay $6.45 million in total to settle the lawsuit.
“Antisemitism harassment and other forms of intimidation are antithetical to our values and have no place at the University of California,” UC Board of Regents Chair Janet Reilly said in a statement. “We have been clear about where we have fallen short, and we are committed to doing better moving forward. Today’s settlement reflects a critically important goal that we share with the plaintiffs: to foster a safe, secure, and inclusive environment for all members of our community and ensure that there is no room for antisemitism anywhere on campus.”
On the same day, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Michigan Senate Candidate Sits Down for Interview With Anti-Israel Streamer
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed Launches Bid (Source: WLNS 6 News/Youtube)
Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat running for the US Senate in Michigan, recently appeared on the platform of controversial anti-Israel social media personality Hasan Piker, raising questions about the candidate’s positions on the Jewish state.
El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, is mounting a 2026 progressive campaign for the open Senate seat in Michigan. His appearance on Piker’s stream, which aired on YouTube and Twitch, covered a range of topics from health care to foreign policy. But his decision to appear on a stream by Piker, who has an extensive history of repudiating Israel and defending the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, has drawn scrutiny.
The two did not talk in depth about Israel or the ongoing war in Gaza during the interview. However, Piker stated that anti-Israel politicians can now succeed in American politics as opposed to previous generations, pointing to the ascendance of New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani, who has made activism against the Jewish state a cornerstone of his political career. Piker encouraged El-Sayed not to “back away” from condemnations of Israel, claiming that “a lot of people agree” with the far left on the issue.
Piker has an extensive history of repudiating Israel as an “apartheid state” and defending atrocities committed against its civilians. In a 2024 livestream, Piker minimized sexual assaults committed against Israeli women at the hands of Hamas, saying “it doesn’t matter if rapes f—king happened on Oct. 7.” He has also defended violence by both Hamas and the Houthis, a Yemen-based Islamist terror group, as legitimate “resistance,” and said he doesn’t “have an issue with” Hezbollah, which pummeled Israel with an unremitting barrage of missiles and rockets from southern Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Jewish state.
El-Sayed has also positioned himself as a fierce critic of Israel. The progressive champion was a prominent supporter of the “Uncommitted movement,” a coalition of Democratic officials which refused to support the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign over her support for Israel. However, El-Sayed later clarified that he would support Harris over Donald Trump in the general election.
El-Sayed has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing, “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that they should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting military aid for Israel, saying “we should be spending that money here at home.”
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German Foreign Minister Tones Down Palestinian Recognition Talk on West Bank Trip
Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul gestures next to a member of clergy during the visit to the town of Taybeh, a Christian village in the West Bank, Aug. 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Sawafta
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul sought to tone down previous comments about his country’s position on Palestinian statehood during a trip to the West Bank on Friday, saying Germany had no immediate plans to recognize a Palestinian state.
Wadephul’s comment followed sharp criticism from Israeli officials over his earlier suggestion, before he left for the trip, that Germany could respond to any unilateral Israeli actions with recognition of a Palestinian state.
Far-right Israeli government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had written on X: “80 years after the Holocaust, and Germany returns to supporting Nazism.”
After meeting Israel’s foreign minister, prime minister, and president on Thursday evening, Wadephul explained on Friday that Germany did not plan to recognize a Palestinian state immediately, “as that is one of the final steps to be taken” as part of a two-state solution.
Wadephul’s attempt to clarify his remarks highlights Germany’s longstanding difficulty in taking a clear position on the issue, caught between growing international pressure on Israel amid the Gaza war and Germany’s own post-Holocaust commitment to ensuring Israel’s security.
He called on Israel to ensure safe access for United Nations agencies to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, saying the current restrictions were worsening the crisis.
“The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza must end now,” Wadephul said, stressing that aid distribution through the UN needed to resume without obstacles.
He said Germany would provide an additional 5 million euros ($5.7 million) to the UN World Food Program to support bakeries and soup kitchens and fund a field hospital in Gaza City.
Asked about Israeli concerns that aid could be diverted by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Wadephul acknowledged that misuse could not be fully ruled out but said it was no reason to block relief efforts.
“The best way to prevent Hamas from misusing supplies is to deliver more aid and ensure full coverage for the population,” he said.