RSS
George Washington University Students Hold ‘Jewish Pride’ Rally as Pro-Hamas Encampment Remains on Campus
“Show Your Jewish Pride” rally at George Washington University G Street Park on May 2, 2024. Photo: Dion J. Pierre
Washington, DC — George Washington University (GW) was the stage of two dueling demonstrations on Thursday as Jewish students held a rally just a block away from the school’s pro-Hamas encampment, an illegal occupation of school property which has become an emblem of surging campus antisemitism in America.
“When Jewish students across the country are harassed — yelled at, spat on, concerned, and blocked from the very places they have a right to be — we respond with songs of hope and humanity, as a community,” GW senior Sabrina Soffer told a crowd of hundreds that gathered in blistering heat. “This is our defiance. We respond to slurs by mobs wishing our existence away by flying our flags high — tapestries of our past and present, our people and purpose.”
The rally, titled “Show Your Jewish Pride,” was a student-led initiative organized by a consortium of student groups, including GW for Israel (GWI), Students Supporting Israel (SSI), and the Jewish Students Association (JSA). Soffer, their principal leader and organizer, has appeared all over national media to spread awareness of rising antisemitism, and, last year, she delivered a soaring speech before hundreds of thousands of people at the March for Israel in Washington, DC.
Nearly a dozen speakers addressed the crowd on Thursday as Israeli and American flags rippled in the wind. One of them, Leat Corinne Unger, drove to Washington from New York to advocate the release of the more than 100 Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza by the Hamas terrorist group. One of them is her cousin, Omer Shem Tov, who was abducted while attending the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Oct. 7.
“He is my cousin. He was 20 when he was kidnapped. He celebrated his 21st birthday three weeks into captivity, and it’s been 209 days since we last heard from him,” Unger told The Algemeiner during an interview. “It’s a nightmare that has lasted for 209 days. I hope that everyone will remember that we’re all fighting numerous battles on many fronts, but the most important priority is to bring our brothers and sisters home. I don’t think we can be whole, healed, and proud until they’re home. Even after Omer gets home, if there is anyone who is still there, I’m going to be fighting for them.”
Unger added that Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel upended her life.
“It changed me and put everything into perspective,” she continued. “I’m no longer a speech pathologist. I’m no longer a learning specialist. I’m no longer a director of a school. I’m now a full fledged advocate of my people.”
Since Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents have reached record levels around the world, including in the US and Europe.
Another speaker on Thursday, pro-Israel activist and social media influencer Lizzy Savetsky, told The Algemeiner that showing solidarity with Jewish students has become her life’s mission.
“I think this is the most important work that I could be doing right now,” she said. “Fighting antisemitism is overwhelming. It’s a global issue, but what we’re seeing on college campuses right now and the lack of protection and the lack of advocacy for Jewish students is shocking and extremely disturbing. So I just want to be there for them and let them know they’re not alone. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be a Jewish student on campus right now.”
Following the event, Savetsky resolved to walk through GW’s pro-Hamas encampment and invited The Algemeiner to join her. Wearing a t-shirt that said “Shalom” — which means “peace” in Hebrew and is often used as a greeting — she was promptly noticed by two protesters who proceeded to follow her every step while lodging accusations of anti-Palestinian racism. Others soon noticed her presence, and the mass of students and faculty erupted into chants of “Zionist go home!”
Savetsky was accompanied by Lauren Kagen, a social media director for the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC).
“What was most shocking was the presence of faculty,” Savetsky told The Algemeiner after the encounter. “This is supposed to be an educational institution, and how can Jewish students feel safe attending their classes when their professors are out there protesting against them? But I am so proud of our people and who we are. Our love will prevail over their hate, and seeing all of that just encourages me to keep on fighting.”
The Metropolitan Police Department has declined to help George Washington University remove the pro-Hamas encampment from campus, according to numerous reports. Republican lawmakers have called for the students to be arrested.
“They are in blatant violation of university policy, but we won’t be intimidated,” GW senior Skyler Sieradzky said.
GW has been one of many college campuses to be engulfed in the anti-Israel demonstrations that have swept across the country.
For over two weeks, university students have been amassing in the hundreds at a growing number of schools, taking over sections of campuses by setting up “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” and refusing to leave unless administrators condemn and boycott Israel. Footage of the protests has shown demonstrators chanting in support of Hamas, calling for the destruction of Israel, and even threatening to harm members of the Jewish community on campus. In many cases, activists have also lambasted the US and Western civilization more broadly.
The protests initially erupted across the US but have since spread to university campuses around the world, primarily in the West. The Algemeiner has reported on how in many instances the faculty, rather than the students, have been the key forces driving the demonstrations and keeping university presidents on their heels.
The protests have erupted amid a surge in antisemitism on university campuses. In the months since Oct. 7, anti-Zionist activists inspired by Hamas’ barbarity have bullied and even assaulted Jewish students while demanding that colleges implement a full boycott of Israel — an action that would purge schools of Jews and Zionists, experts have told The Algemeiner. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents on college campus rose 321 percent in 2023, disrupting the academic lives of Jewish students and leaving them uncertain about the fate of the American Jewish community.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post George Washington University Students Hold ‘Jewish Pride’ Rally as Pro-Hamas Encampment Remains on Campus first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
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.
RSS
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.
RSS
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login