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‘I don’t think he’s against us’: Israeli protesters dialogue with UN chief during encounters outside his home

(New York Jewish Week) — One Friday morning last month, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took the short walk from his townhouse to his car in freezing weather, he was confronted by a group of Israeli protesters who peppered him with questions about the war in Gaza and his efforts to free the hostages held by Hamas.

Guterres — flanked by security — stopped for a few seconds to chat, his breath visible in the chill. He complained about his portrayal in the Israeli press. A protester handed him a holiday card advocating for the hostages.

Shany Granot-Lubaton, one of the protest leaders, asked him about his reaction to a 47-minute film of Hamas’ atrocities, produced by the Israeli government.

“How was watching the horror movie?” she asked.

“It is human nature at its worst,” Guterres said.

The protesters thanked him, and he moved on.

Friday morning demonstrations outside Guterres’ Sutton Place home has become something of a ritual for several dozen Israeli-Americans advocating for the 136 hostages still held in Gaza. Shortly before 9 a.m., they gather on the sidewalk outside Guterres’ stately brick home, its front door framed by two white Greek pillars. Their hope is to catch him while he is exiting with a handful of security guards, and to talk with him before he gets into a black Mercedes sedan parked at the curb.

Israel has a famously adversarial relationship to the U.N., and at first, that was the activists’ posture as well. But as they approach 100 days since Oct. 7, and prepare for a large rally outside the U.N. on Friday, a change is afoot: Guterres and the protesters have started a dialogue.

“At the beginning we were very, very angry and shocked by how they reacted, and we felt like the U.N. was totally not standing for the hostages and for Israel,” Granot-Lubaton told the New York Jewish Week.

But now, she said, “He’s listening to them, he’s meeting with them. Does he do enough? Of course not. He’s not doing enough, but it’s not as it was at the beginning. Every week, when he sees us, he stops, he speaks with us respectfully, he’s listening, so I respect him for that. He could have done it differently.”

A spokesperson for Guterres, Stéphane Dujarric, said the feeling was mutual.

“Whenever he’s in New York, they’re outside and he talks to them and he always welcomes the dialogue,” Dujarric said. “His door is always open.”

Protesters outside the home of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, January 5, 2024. (Luke Tress)

The protests began as a way to castigate the U.N. chief. On Oct. 25 last year,  Guterres incensed Israelis by saying that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum,” linking the terrorist atrocities to occupation, settlements and economic woes. That statement led Gilad Erdan, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, to call for Guterres’ resignation.

The demonstrations outside Guterres’ home started that week. The activists cut their teeth on protests in New York against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul before pivoting to hostage advocacy after Oct. 7. They borrowed a tactic from their counterparts in Israel, who have been protesting outside officials’ houses for the past several years.

At first, they were angry with the U.N. and Guterres’ response to the Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 240 hostages, alongside other atrocities. But the activists’ views softened after Guterres viewed the Israeli government’s graphic video of the Hamas attack, and met with hostages’ families.

“At the beginning we were very angry, there was a lot of anger, like, ‘We’re going to come in front of his house and yell at him,’” said Yaala Ballin, an Israeli jazz singer who has lived in the city for 19 years and is part of the core of the Friday morning protesters.

“We kind of changed our position,” she said. “We realized that we need his help and we need to keep him on our side and we want to have him join our purpose, bring our side out there.”

Gradually, she said, Guterres began to engage. First he began pausing before getting in the car, moments that later turned into brief, cordial exchanges. “The last time was really a conversation,” she said.

In one of the encounters with the protesters, in early December, as Guterres was walking out the door, a demonstrator pursued him while holding a hostage flier, saying, “We just wanted to remind you that our hostages are still in Gaza.”

“I’m totally committed,” Guterres responded.

Granot-Lubaton said Guterres was more approachable than some of the Israeli government’s own ministers.

“He is not the demon in this story, although there are people who are trying to make him that way, but at the same time he could do a lot more,” she said. “It’s not a black and white thing.”

The demonstrators feel like they’re having an impact. Hours after the exchange with Granot-Lubaton about the film, Guterres demanded on X, formerly Twitter, that all hostages be released “immediately and unconditionally.”

“Nothing can possibly justify the horrific terror attacks launched by Hamas on 7 October,” Guterres said. But the Israeli activists don’t quite feel that he’s on their side: He followed that statement with three posts either criticizing Israel or expressing alarm about the violence in Gaza.

Protesters outside the home of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, December 8, 2024. (Luke Tress)

Guterres has also shown the protesters that he carried dog tags reading “Bring them home” in his pocket. The dog tags are part of a campaign by the families of hostages, some of whom gave the item to Guterres during a meeting.

He carried them, Granot-Lubaton pointed out, but did not wear them.

“I think in a way it symbolizes his entire reaction to this crisis. Maybe he does care about the hostages, but for different political reasons and the way the U.N. works right now, he’s not wearing it,” Granot-Lubaton said. “He’s not public enough with his commitment.”

Dujarric, the Guterres spokesperson, said, “From the start, the secretary-general has been heartbroken and devastated about what happened and what is happening to the hostages” and continues to push for their release.

“What he’s been saying on the hostages from the get-go is they need to be released unconditionally, that nothing can justify it,” Dujarric said.

Guterres isn’t always there on Friday mornings, and whether or not he shows up, the demonstrators stay for about 30 minutes, holding fliers with the faces of the hostages and reading out the captives’ names. They hang colorful origami cranes symbolizing the hostages on a tree outside Guterres’ front door. Lampposts in the quiet, upscale neighborhood are plastered with the fliers, which are ubiquitous on the city’s streets and have become a battleground between pro- and anti-Israel activists.

Hostage families and Israeli officials, including left-wing politicians such as Yair Golan and Gilad Kariv, have spoken at the events outside Guterres’ home. Balllin usually sings the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikva,” at the end of the rallies. She said the demonstrators have also become friendly with police outside Guterres’ home.

Guterres’ powers as secretary-general are limited, but the activists believe he sets the tone for much of the international community. They say international agencies can do more to help liberate the hostages, including pressuring Qatar and Egypt, which hold sway with Hamas’ leaders, to push for their release.

Protest leader Shany Granot-Lubaton leads a crowd outside the home of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, January 5, 2024. (Luke Tress)

The demonstrators are also seeking more straightforward and specific condemnation of Hamas’ war crimes, including statements that are not accompanied by criticism of Israel. In late November, Guterres condemned “accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas” for the first time. Granot-Lubaton is hoping for stronger language.

“I would appreciate him saying that rape and kidnapping people and murdering innocent people is not a legitimate way of resistance,” Granot-Lubaton said. “You don’t need high moral standards to say such a thing.”

Guterres has also voiced a grievance to the protesters about his portrayal in the Israeli media after a tense encounter with hostage families. “What I read in the Israeli press was not what I said,” Guterres said.

“We know,” one of the protesters said.

And the protesters have tried to address his concerns. Ballin said some of them contacted an Israeli reporter asking for a change to an article to better reflect what had actually happened.

“I’m not angry with him anymore. I don’t think he’s against us,” Ballin said. “I think he ran into a very, very complicated situation and he’s not doing enough. I’m not angry, I just feel like he needs to be directed and reminded of the good he can do.”

She added, “We need him, and we feel he can really help just make statements loud and clear for the world to follow.”


The post ‘I don’t think he’s against us’: Israeli protesters dialogue with UN chief during encounters outside his home appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.

The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.

Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.

Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”

“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”

Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.

UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.

Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.

Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.

“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.

“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”

On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”

The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.

“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.

Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.

Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.

“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.

The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.

“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.

“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”

During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”

At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”

“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.

The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.

As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.

Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.

For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance. 

On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.

One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”

The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.

These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference. 

Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.

This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students. 

Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.

As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.

These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.

McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction. 

This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.

We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”

Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.

The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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