The B. Altman & Company Building housing the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. Photo Credit: Beyond My Ken/Wikimedia.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I joined five brave professors at the City University of New York (CUNY) in filing a lawsuit against the union that represents us.

Why? For starters, as a Zionist Jew, I was appalled when the union’s delegates chanted “Zionism out of CUNY!” at an anti-Israel rally.

And I was disgusted when the union passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that called Israel an “apartheid” state.

My fellow plaintiffs and I aren’t members of the union, but it imposes its tainted services on us, nonetheless.

New York’s Taylor Law cruelly forces us to accept this hate-infested union’s representation, even while the union’s members and delegates openly chant that they want to expel Zionists from the university.

That’s right — this union is supposed to protect our jobs, but it is doing its best to destroy them.

The union has just ratified a new contract, which will affect our terms and conditions of employment and the campus environment for Jews.

Despite the findings by multiple investigations — the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, the report by Judge Lippman commissioned by New York’s governor, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determination — of the massive antisemitism problem at CUNY, the union has been silent on the issue, and so is the new contract.

Does the contract propose reforms that will protect Zionist Jews from the violence and harassment that we have suffered on campus? No it does not.

Does it rectify what I see as the expungement of Jews from senior leadership positions at CUNY? Not by my read.

Does it demand measures to prevent violent and campus-disrupting anti-Israel encampments? No — probably because the union defended them.

However, because the union has pushed us out of its membership by spouting hateful attacks against our religion and heritage, my fellow plaintiffs and hundreds of other Jews have zero influence over the contract’s details.

We’ve been driven out, then denied a vote on an agreement that affects our careers and our safety.

So much for democracy and a union’s duty of equal and fair representation of all groups.

Union officials don’t want Zionist Jews in their membership ranks? Fine. They shouldn’t be speaking or negotiating for us either. We don’t need or want their “representation.”

A similar conflict existed 3,500 years ago in Egypt.

A tyrannical Pharaoh abused Jews, treating them like an underclass and exploiting their labor — until someone stood up.

Moses made a famous demand of that unaccountable leader: Let my people go.

I say the same to the leaders of the Professional Staff Congress.

They don’t want us, but they are forcing us to labor under the conditions they set. And they have argued that representing every last professor at CUNY is “fundamental to a union’s power.”

By their own admission, they are demanding the right to represent Zionist Jews not for our benefit but for theirs.

Unfortunately, on Monday, the US Supreme Court denied our appeal to address this ongoing injustice, meaning our antisemitic union will remain free to enhance its own power by mistreating groups it considers to be undesirable.

The Court has chosen not to intervene, but that doesn’t mean our representatives can’t get involved. It’s happened before. Just ahead of a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that affected public employees’ rights, lawmakers passed a significant change to the Taylor Law. They should do so again.

And Congress has a role, too. If Federal legislators really want to address the evil and insanity that is transpiring on our campuses, they must recognize that Marxist and antisemitic faculty unions are behind so much of it. A powerful first step would be passing Senator Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) proposed Union Members Right to Know Act, a bill that would prevent unions from promoting antisemitism and other hateful ideologies.

For our union at CUNY, after years of litigation and discrimination, it’s time.

Let my people go.

Jeffrey Lax is a professor of law and chair of the business department at CUNY, a co-founder of S.A.F.E. Campus, and a plaintiff in Goldstein v. PSC/CUNY.

The post Professor to CUNY’s Faculty Union: Let My People Go! first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has reported for years on the endless stream of Jew-hatred that the Palestinian Authority (PA) constantly disseminates. This has led many Palestinians to hate Jews.

However, even by PA hate-standards, a recent item published in its official daily deserves honorable mention. The article is written as a letter to the writer’s German friend named Thomas, in which he spews just about every libel he can think of against the Jews — and then uses that as justification for why Europeans and Arabs should hate them:

Thomas, I have been monitoring them [Jews] in my land for 76 years. I have been monitoring their actions and their disgraceful deeds … I have been monitoring their dreams, which seek to concentrate all the happiness in the world in their hands. I have been monitoring their behavior, which is filled with barbarism and bloodthirstiness. I have been monitoring their voices, which call for superiority and arrogance, and claim that they are the only ones close to Heaven…

I have been monitoring what the world says about them, from all corners of the globe, and I see and understand the damage they have done to people, and how they have monopolized life and considered it their property and possession. The same is true of their situation on everything concerning money, power, arrogance, impudence, and declaring publicly — without convincing excuses and in a shameless fashion — that they are the children and beloved of Allah, while the others are his slaves and nothing more … They want to subjugate the entire world, and not just my Palestinian people …

Yes, Thomas. I have been monitoring them to know what kind of people they are, what they are made of, what characteristics they have inherited, and why they behave this way that the world fears and worries about — in the West, in the East, in the North, and in the South — and why they are busy creating lobbies to pressure states, peoples, institutions, bodies, and centers of power and influence in the world …

Thomas, ever since they — and I mean the Israelis — are in our Palestinian land at the expense of a people, land, values, history, and dreams, they operate by the culture of intimidation, not only towards us but towards all the region’s peoples … They have painted our lands with blood and flooded the space with fear, as they have flooded our cemeteries with laments … The only scents lingering there are the smell of gunpowder and corpses. [emphasis added]

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 15, 2024]

Profound Jew-hatred is so entrenched in Palestinian society because it comes from its very leadership.

As PA leader Mahmoud Abbas infamously stated, Hitler had not “killed the Jews because they were Jews,” rather “Hitler … fought the Jews because they worked based on usury and money. In other words, they caused ruin…”

Official PA TV, Speech at 11th conference of the Fatah Revolutionary Council at the PA headquarters in Ramallah on Aug. 24, 2023

Official PA TV tows the line of the PA leadership, and takes advantage of every opportunity to spread hate about Jews.

A PA TV host recently explained that “the sadism of the invaders [Jews] is embodied … this sadism was not coincidental, but is the result of a criminal, Zionist, racist ideology, which the Zionist movement has fed the Jews’ souls.”

The PA TV “Israeli affairs expert,” Alyan Al-Hindi, concurred that the “Israeli culture of murder and destruction is built on … the European culture, which is based on murder, destruction, and racism [and] on the Torah.”

Official PA TV, In Memory, Nov. 3, 2024

Another guest on PA TV likewise demonized Jews, claiming that the Torah/Bible is the reason the Jew “enjoys this killing and does not feel pangs of conscience. Why? Because for him, within him, in his experience, in his consciousness, in this core of consciousness, he must kill and he is rewarded for this killing.”

Official PA TV, Feb. 9, 2024

The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.

The post How to Hate the Jews? The Palestinian Authority Counts the Ways first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Pro-Hamas demonstrators, many of whom are college students, in New York City on May 11, 2024. Photo: John Lamparski via Reuters Connect

The Lancet has a history of publishing agenda-driven and politicized anti-Israel content that goes way beyond the field of healthcare and medicine.

In July 2024, the medical journal was called out for outrageously claiming that as many as 186,000 Gazans had been killed in the current war. Many media outlets rushed to print dramatic headlines under the imprimatur of The Lancet — a significant error given that the casualty claims came not from a peer-reviewed study but from a letter sent to The Lancet, whose writers included at least one with a history of defending Palestinian terrorism.

Now, The Lancet has published a study claiming that the Gaza death toll may have been underreported by 41%.

While this time claims concerning Gaza casualty figures appear in The Lancet in the form of an actual scientific study, the recent report still has numerous similarities with the previous claims, namely a reliance on faulty Hamas sources and a disturbing lack of impartiality on the part of its authors, including one who justified Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

Faulty Science

Even without delving deeply into the numbers, The Lancet’s study is based on a false premise: the accuracy of Palestinian Ministry of Health casualty figures. Openly stating that its methodology is based on this source is effectively admitting that Hamas provides the numbers:

We used a three-list capture–recapture analysis using data from Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) hospital lists, an MoH online survey, and social media obituaries.

Furthermore, experts found faults in the study’s number-crunching as well as it other sources, and published their conclusions online:

Again @TheLancet medical journal published pseudo-scientific Palestinian propaganda, dressed up with graphs, meaningless algorithms & fake data from Hamas/Palestinian sources, UN agencies that parrot Hamas etal, and “Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor” – a notorius Hamas-run NGO… pic.twitter.com/SdfDpRuvND

— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) January 10, 2025

Who’s Behind the Study?

Most disturbingly, the study’s authors were exposed by media analyst Eitan Fischberger. One of them posted about Israel’s “terror” in Lebanon, another accused Israel of committing a genocide, and yet another justified Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel:

Many media outlets are buzzing about a new @TheLancet study claiming Gaza deaths are undercounted by 41%.

I’ll leave the number-crunching to others, but it’s worth noting that most of the study’s authors are radically anti-Israel—which is already cause to doubt their analysis  pic.twitter.com/F45XcZvYIh

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 10, 2025

The Media Coverage

Throughout the conflict, the media have unquestioningly republished Gazan casualty figures whose ultimate source is Hamas. They’ve quoted Hamas’ numbers uncritically, while adding caveats whenever Israel has offered its own estimates, particularly concerning the number of dead terrorists.

So it’s hardly surprising that numerous outlets saw fit to cover The Lancet’s study.

Disappointingly, given its previous in-depth coverage of the Henry Jackson Society’s study on inflated Gaza casualty figures, The Telegraph‘s report on The Lancet study failed even to mention that the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s data was courtesy of the Hamas-run ministry in Gaza.

The BBC and The Guardian, meanwhile, took the opportunity to blame Israel for not letting foreign journalists into Gaza as the reason why casualty figures could not be independently verified by the media.

These outlets and Reuters did at least include some Israeli reaction (albeit relatively generic), as well as the fact that the study’s figures don’t differentiate between combatants and civilians.

Outlets like CNN and Politico, however, simply parroted the study without any caveat.

For example, here’s Politico’s headline as opposed to the more careful phrasing of Reuters:

But the fact remains that all these outlets should have been more critical of The Lancet’s study, which was thoroughly debunked on social media. Because, unlike those who did the debunking, journalists still have no issue with relying on sources like the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in their everyday reporting, and nor did they do any due diligence on the study’s authors.

Thanks to The Lancet’s professional (albeit undeserved) reputation and the media’s penchant for reporting a source that it treats as beyond criticism, this latest anti-Israel claim has the potential to become part of a narrative that has already accepted disputed casualty figures as fact.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Biased Science: The Lancet Claims Gaza Casualty Count Underreported first appeared on Algemeiner.com.