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Gaza Protests Are Based on Jew Hatred, Not Human Rights
The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Photo: Reuters Connect
There is no issue that brings out so many global protestors, week after week, as Israel’s war to defeat the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. But whatever is causing this unique display of passion and animosity against Israel, it is not humanitarian concern.
Hamas’ decision to start this war through a campaign of mass murder, rape, and kidnapping on October 7, and then fight it from beneath and behind Gaza’s civilians and civilian infrastructure, has led to heavy casualties and severe suffering for the Palestinian population. Their plight should move us all.
But contrary to pervasive and outrageous claims of “genocide,” the Palestinians’ plight is unfortunately an example of the horrors of urban warfare. It is strange, then, that only this war should generate such hysteria as to drown out every other conflict and atrocity.
No encampments were set up across the world to protest the wars in Syria and Sudan, where so many more innocent Arab civilians died. And no other conflict has aroused the rabid passion and hate displayed against Israel, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Unlike Israel’s war to dismantle Hamas, Russia’s war against Ukraine, now in its second year, does arguably merit the use of the terms “genocide” and crimes against humanity.
Every Russian official from Vladimir Putin on down has made the intent of this campaign clear: to wipe out Ukrainians as a national group; indeed, Russia denies Ukrainians’ existence as an ethnic group in the first place.
While the genocidal nature of Russia’s imperial war does not involve total extermination like the Nazi Holocaust, it violates nearly every other section of the Genocide Convention. This includes the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia. In fact, Russia is so proud of this forcible transfer that it puts the number at hundreds of thousands.
Torture, sexual violence, and rape are rampant and systematic. While the mass graves and murders uncovered at Bucha and other areas around Kyiv are well known, that process has been replicated across all the Ukrainian territory that Russia controls. The civilian death toll is unknown, but one analysis suggested as many as 75,000 people may have been killed in Mariupol alone.
There are approximately ten million Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons, and there is widespread intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure across the country.
The outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war will also decide the future of the international order. Yet neither the humanitarian atrocities nor the existential element of Russia’s invasion seem to stir much concern in newsrooms, in the streets, or among politicians these days.
The latest civil war in Sudan, raging for just over one year, has also seen barbaric and genocidal violence and civilian displacement and suffering. In particular, the Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have targeted the ethnic African Masalit tribe, reportedly killing as many as 15,000 in West Darfur’s provincial capital of El Geneina alone. This includes reports of the systematic murder of primarily male children and infants. Sexual violence and rape are also ubiquitous and methodical.
Edem Wosornu, director of operations at the UN Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), recently asserted that “By all measures — the sheer scale of humanitarian needs, the numbers of people displaced and facing hunger — Sudan is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory.”
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child warned that “24 million children are at risk of a generational catastrophe.”
In Myanmar, the civil war raging since the junta overthrew the democratic government in February 2021 has seen some of the worst barbarism imaginable. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk described the junta’s terror campaign against its opponents as “inhumanity in its vilest form,” including mass killings and “burning them alive, dismembering, raping, beheading, stabbing, bludgeoning, and using them as human shields against attacks and landmines.” Mutilated corpses and heads are displayed as warnings, including the bodies of defiled women with “foreign objects lodged in their bodies.”
Principled activists would be at least as vocal about these staggering atrocities, among many others, as they are about Israel. Instead, there is only widespread indifference and deafening silence. The vast majority of the people outraged by Israel’s supposed “genocide” in Gaza, it can be safely concluded, are not driven by principles at all. They are driven by hatred of Jews and Israel, pure and simple.
Oved Lobel is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).
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Trump’s Travel Ban on 12 Countries Goes Into Effect Early Monday
US President Donald Trump attends the Saudi-US Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US President Donald Trump’s order banning citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States goes into effect at 12:01 am ET (0401 GMT) on Monday, a move the president promulgated to protect the country from “foreign terrorists.”
The countries affected by the latest travel ban are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The entry of people from seven other countries – Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela – will be partially restricted.
Trump, a Republican, said the countries subject to the most severe restrictions were determined to harbor a “large-scale presence of terrorists,” fail to cooperate on visa security, have an inability to verify travelers’ identities, as well as inadequate record-keeping of criminal histories and high rates of visa overstays in the United States.
He cited last Sunday’s incident in Boulder, Colorado, in which an Egyptian national tossed a gasoline bomb into a crowd of pro-Israel demonstrators as an example of why the new curbs are needed. But Egypt is not part of the travel ban.
The travel ban forms part of Trump’s policy to restrict immigration into the United States and is reminiscent of a similar move in his first term when he barred travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Officials and residents in countries whose citizens will soon be banned expressed dismay and disbelief.
Chad President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said he had instructed his government to stop granting visas to US citizens in response to Trump’s action.
“Chad has neither planes to offer nor billions of dollars to give, but Chad has its dignity and its pride,” he said in a Facebook post, referring to countries such as Qatar, which gifted the U.S. a luxury airplane for Trump’s use and promised to invest billions of dollars in the U.S.
Afghans who worked for the US or US-funded projects and were hoping to resettle in the US expressed fear that the travel ban would force them to return to their country, where they could face reprisal from the Taliban.
Democratic US lawmakers also voiced concern about the policies.
“Trump’s travel ban on citizens from over 12 countries is draconian and unconstitutional,” said US Representative Ro Khanna on social media late on Thursday. “People have a right to seek asylum.”
The post Trump’s Travel Ban on 12 Countries Goes Into Effect Early Monday first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Military Says It Struck Hamas Member in Southern Syria
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron after a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stephanie Lecocq/Pool
The Israeli military said on Sunday that it struck a member of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in southern Syria’s Mazraat Beit Jin, days after Israel carried out its first airstrikes in the country in nearly a month.
Hamas did not immediately comment on the strike.
Israel said on Tuesday it hit weapons belonging to the government in retaliation for the firing of two projectiles towards Israel for the first time under the country’s new leadership. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz held Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa accountable.
Damascus in response said reports of the shelling were unverified, reiterating that Syria does not pose a threat to any regional party.
A little known group named “Martyr Muhammad Deif Brigades,” an apparent reference to Hamas’ military leader who was killed in an Israeli strike in 2024, reportedly claimed responsibility for the shelling. Reuters, however, could not independently verify the claim.
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Israel Orders Military to Stop Gaza-Bound Yacht Carrying Greta Thunberg
FILE PHOTO: Activist Greta Thunberg sits aboard the aid ship Madleen, which left the Italian port of Catania on June 1 to travel to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid, in this picture released on June 2, 2025 on social media. Photo: Freedom Flotilla Coalition/via REUTERS/File Photo
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told the military on Sunday to stop a charity boat carrying activists including Sweden’s Greta Thunberg who are planning to defy an Israeli blockade and reach Gaza.
Operated by the pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), the British-flagged Madleen yacht set sail from Sicily on June 6 and is currently off the Egyptian coast, heading slowly towards the Gaza Strip, which is besieged by Israel.
“I instructed the IDF to act so that the Madleen .. does not reach Gaza,” Katz said in a statement.
“To the antisemitic Greta and her Hamas-propaganda-spouting friends, I say clearly: You’d better turn back, because you will not reach Gaza.”
Climate activist Thunberg said she joined the Madleen crew to “challenge Israel’s illegal siege and escalating war crimes” in Gaza and highlight the urgent need for humanitarian aid. She has rejected previous Israeli accusations of antisemitism.
Israel went to war with Hamas in October 2023 after the Islamist terrorists launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing more 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to the enclave.
Katz said the blockade was essential to Israel’s national security as it seeks to eliminate Hamas.
“The State of Israel will not allow anyone to break the naval blockade on Gaza, whose primary purpose is to prevent the transfer of weapons to Hamas,” he said.
The Madleen is carrying a symbolic quantity of aid, including rice and baby formula, the FFC has said.
FFC press officer Hay Sha Wiya said on Sunday the boat was currently some 160 nautical miles (296 km) from Gaza. “We are preparing for the possibility of interception,” she said.
Besides Thunberg, there are 11 other crew members aboard, including Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament.
Israeli media have reported that the military plans to intercept the yacht before it reaches Gaza and escort it to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The crew would then be deported.
In 2010, Israeli commandos killed 10 people when they boarded a Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, that was leading a small flotilla towards Gaza.
The post Israel Orders Military to Stop Gaza-Bound Yacht Carrying Greta Thunberg first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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