A Jewish civil rights organization has issued a blistering legal letter to Northwestern University, demanding the “nullification” of a series of concessions school president Michael Schill granted a pro-Hamas group to end an illegal occupation of school property.

Northwestern was one of dozens of schools where pro-Hamas Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters set up “encampments” on school property, chanted antisemitic slogans, and vowed not to leave unless administrators agreed to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state.

After hours of negotiating with protesters, Schill agreed to establish a new scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contact potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, and create a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim students. The university — where protesters shouted “Kill the Jews!” — also agreed to form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.

Writing on behalf of StandWithUs, a New York City-based law firm — Kasowitz, Benson, and Torres LLP — told the university’s board of trustees on Monday that the agreement violated federal law, as well as its own polices and bylaws.

“This outrageous capitulation to accommodate the demands of antisemitic agitators — who openly espoused vicious antisemitism, assaulted, spat on, and stalked Jewish students and engaged in numerous violations of Northwestern’s codes and policies — only enables and encourages future misconduct,” the letter said. “It is in plain violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, risks triggering state anti-BDS sanctions, and apparently was made without the required approval of the Board of Trustees and in contravention of Northwestern’s bylaws and university statues.”

It added, “Accordingly, this purported agreement not only unlawfully rewards antisemitism but has severely and perhaps irreparably damaged Northwestern’s reputation, but it has also exposed Northwestern to potential liability and jeopardizes it access to federal and state funds.”

Schill was grilled about the deal — which has been referred to as the Deering Meadow Agreement — last month during a hearing held by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) called it a “unilateral capitulation” and accused Schill of failing to protect Jewish students from the violence of the anti-Zionist protesters, incidents of which Schill described as “allegations.” Later, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for his resignation from office, citing a slew of alleged offenses, including his revealing that no Jewish students or faculty were consulted before he conceded to the protesters’ demands. Schill, the ADL stressed, also confessed to appointing accused antisemites to a task force on antisemitism that ultimately disbanded when its members could not agree on a definition of antisemitism.

Schill, however, has forcefully denied that he acceded to any of SJP’s core demands, including their insistence on boycotting and divesting from Israel and companies that do business with it. His critics, including StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein, maintain that he did.

“Northwestern has surrendered to agitators’ unlawful conduct and outrageous demands in a move that threatens to set a national precedent for university leadership, enabling and supporting the complete breakdown of civility, policies, and the law,” Rothstein said on Monday. “At a time when Jewish and Israeli students across the country are under unprecedented attack, Northwestern’s leadership shouldn’t engage in patchwork unlawful actions but instead strive to be a part of the solution.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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Liora Argamani, 61, mother of rescued Israeli hostage Noa Argamani, passed away on Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital after fighting stage 4 brain cancer. 

Noa, an only child, was rescued from Hamas captivity in Gaza in a daring operation from Hamas captivity on June 8. Her mother passed away less than a month later. 

The kidnapping of Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or — who still remains in Hamas captivity — at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 was captured in a heartbreaking video, sparking international outcry. Argamani was held hostage by Hamas for eight months before Israeli forces rescued her along with three other hostages: Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. The commander of Israel’s elite Yamam division who led the mission, Arnon Zamora, was mortally wounded in the operation.

In a video released on Saturday night, before her mother passed away, Argamani recounted how she longed to see her parents while she was kidnapped. “My biggest worry in captivity was for my parents,” she said.

Argamani eulogized her mother at her funeral held on Tuesday. “My mother, the best friend I ever had, the strongest person I have known in my life,” she said. “Thank you for the 26 years I had the privilege of being by your side.”

The official X/Twitter account for the State of Israel also mourned the elder Argamani’s passing, writing, “We are devastated to share that Liora Argamani, mother of rescued hostage Noa Argamani, has passed away following an intensive battle with cancer. Our hearts are with Noa and Yaakov Argamani. May Liora’s memory be a blessing.”

Although Noa Argamani reunited with her mother before her passing, rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan’s father passed away from a heart attack only hours before he was rescued. According to a relative in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan, Meir “died of grief” and “a broken heart” over his son’s captivity.

On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel from neighboring Gaza, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others as hostages.

Several hostages were released as part of a temporary truce in November, and others have been rescued, both dead and alive, by Israeli soldiers conducting rescue operations. About 120 hostages remain in Gaza; it is unclear how many are still alive.

The post Mother of Rescued Israeli Hostage Noa Argamani Passes Away After Battling Brain Cancer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Though the most evident source of human governance is power, true power can never stem from war-making stratagems or capacities. In principle, at least, consummate power on planet earth is immortality, but such power is intangible and must be based on faith rather than science. All things considered, the promise of “power over death” holds primary importance in world politics. This is especially the case in the jihadist Middle East.

There are relevant particulars. The consequences of this sort of thinking represent a lethal triumph of anti-Reason over Reason. Such triumph, in turn, expresses the continuing supremacy of primal human satisfactions in war, terrorism and genocide. On this matter of world-historical urgency, scholars and policy-makers should consider the probing observation of Eugene Ionesco in his Journal (1966). Opting to describe killing in general as affirmation of an individual’s “power over death,” the Romanian playwright explains:

I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death … Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.

Whatever the standards of assessment, all individuals and all states coexist in an “asymmetrical” world. Certain state leaderships accept zero-sum linkages between killing and survival (both individual and collective), but others do not. Although this divergence might suggest that some states stand on a higher moral plane than others, it may also place the virtuous state at a grave security disadvantage. As a timely example, this disadvantage describes the growing survival dilemma of Israel, a still-virtuous state that must unceasingly bear the assaults of utterly murderous adversaries.

What should Israel do when it finds itself confronted with faith-driven enemies who abhor Reason and seek personal immortality via “martyrdom?” As an antecedent question, what sort of “faith” can encourage (and cherish) the rape, torture and murder of innocents? Must the virtuous state accept barbarism as its sine qua non to “stay alive”?

There are science-based answers. What is required of still-virtuous states such as Israel is not a replication of enemy crimes, but decent and pragmatic policies that recognize death-avoidance as that enemy’s overriding goal. For Israel, this advice points toward jihadist enemies. Of special concern is a soon-to-be-nuclear capable Iran and Iranian terror-group surrogates (e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah), notably anxious to acquire “power over death.”

Israel’s most immediate concern will be the expanding war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a conflict in which the terrorist patron state (Iran) could display greater commitments to Reason than its associated fighting proxies. Nonetheless, even this relative reasonableness would devolve into brutish expressions of anti-Reason. What else ought Jerusalem to expect from adversaries who take palpable delight in the killing of “others?”

For Israel, there will be moral, legal and tactical imperatives. Though Reason will never govern the world, civilized states ought not plan to join the barbarians. In the best of all possible worlds, national and terror-group leaders could rid themselves of the notion that killing variously designated foes would confer immunity from mortality, but this is not yet the best of all possible worlds.

For the foreseeable future, the defiling dynamics of anti-Reason will continue to hold sway in Islamist politics. In Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank explains these determinative dynamics at a clarifying conceptual level: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”

Israeli analysts will recognize here the elements of jihadist terror, of martyrdom-directed criminality that closely resembles traditional notions of religious sacrifice. In authoritative world law, moreover, jihadist perpetrators are always differentiable from counter-terrorist adversaries by their witting embrace of mens rea or “criminal intent.

Though Israel regards the harms it that unfortunately comes to noncombatant Palestinian Arab populations as the unavoidable costs of counter-terrorism, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally target Israeli civilians. Under international law, both customary and codified, the responsibility for Israel-inflicted harms lies with the jihadists because of their documented resort to “human shields. In law, such resort is unambiguously criminal. The pertinent crime is known formally as “perfidy.”

At a minimum, every virtuous state’s law-based national security policies should build upon intellectual and scientific forms of understanding. Ipso facto, a virtuous state’s “just wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be conducted as contests of mind over mind. These contests should never be regarded as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.

Israel together with all other states coexist in an international state of nature, a perpetually unstable condition that 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes correctly called a “state of war.” Despite being patently unreasonable, barbarous states and their fighting proxies subscribe to the proposition that “sacrificing” specifically reviled “others” (Jews) offers powerful “medicine” against their own deaths. Among other things, this proposition reflects a grimly ominous “triumph” of anti-Reason over Reason.

Our planet’s survival task is primarily an intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, Israel could have no good reason to expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king among its retrograde enemies. For humane and Reason–based governance to develop, enlightened citizens of Islamic countries in the Middle East would first have to cast aside historically discredited ways of thinking about world politics and international law and do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and “mind” over blind faith and “mystery.”

Ironically, the legacy of Westphalia (the 1648 treaty creating modern international law) codifies Reason. We may discover murderous endorsements of anti-Reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, but there have also been voices of a very different sort. For the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he remarks in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset in the Revolt of the Masses. The 20th century Spanish philosopher identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it….”

Amid all that would madden and torment, the modern state and its proxies often “live” at the apex of anti-Reason. Before this self-destroying existence can change, humankind would first have to accept (1) the Reason-backed “sentence” of universal mortality or (2) the continuing supremacy of anti-Reason. If the second assumption is chosen, it could only make sense in a world wherein traditionally compelling promises of immortality were successfully “de-linked” from “religious sacrifices” of war, terrorism and genocide.

As the first choice is inconceivable for a species that has never generally accepted personal mortality, the second choice offers Israel its only realistic decisional context. To be sure, national and global survival amid anti-Reason can hardly be reassuring, but, at least for now, it represents the world’s only plausible prospect. As for convincing aspiring Islamist perpetrators that inflictions of war, terrorism or genocide on “others” could never confer “power over death” – this task becomes the single most important obligation of all civilized states and peoples.

Because the necessary starting point for all calculations is a world of anti-Reason, Israel will need to understand that political concessions (e.g., territorial surrenders and a Palestinian state) could never satisfy their lascivious foes.

Embracing a world of anti-Reason, these enemies are shaped by what Nietzsche calls “a world of desires and passions.” For them, such a world gives a green-light to the sordid pleasures of criminal barbarism so prominently displayed on October 7, 2023.

In essence, Iran, as mentor to the barbarians, represents the juridical incarnation of anti-Reason. A state of Palestine would add to the Iran-backed forces of anti-Reason. Iran-Palestine would present Israel with a unique existential hazard. Potentially, this hazard would be irremediable.

What next? To deal with conspicuously primal foes, enemies that seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential and law-based strategy should emphasize calibrated military remedies. In carrying out its soon-to-be-expanded operations against Hezbollah, Jerusalem ought never to forget that (1) its core adversary is Iran, not an Iranian terror-group proxy; (2) keeping Iran non-nuclear is an immutable national obligation; and (3) a Palestinian state could never satisfy Jerusalem’s adversaries and would inevitably become a “force-multiplying” peril of unprecedented magnitude.

Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. A version of this article was originally published at JewishWebsight.

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