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Jewish Leaders Discuss Campus Antisemitism, Trump Deportation Policy at US Senate

Illustrative: Pro-Hamas students rally at the encampment for Gaza set up at George Washington University students. Washington, DC, April 25, 2024. Photo: Allison Bailey via Reuters Connect

Jewish civil rights advocates, faith leaders, and academics appeared as witnesses for a US Senate committee hearing on Thursday to discuss the ongoing campus antisemitism crisis and the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on anti-Zionist activity, a subject that has sparked a hotly contested debate on civil liberties and the limits of academic freedom.

Held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the hearing came on the heels of a policy offensive in which the Trump administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to Ivy League schools accused of ignoring antisemitic discrimination, created a federal inter-agency task force on antisemitism, and ordered the deportation of anti-Zionist students and faculty who are accused of providing material support to Hamas and participating in other seditious activities.

“Educational institutions are not public streets or sidewalks, and students need not be permitted to engage in expressive activity wherever, whenever, and however they wish — for example, including by wearing masks to conceal their identities — especially when such allowances ultimately contribute to the creation of hostile educational environments,” Carly Gammill, legal policy director at StandWithUs, told the committee, making the case for regulating utterances of campus speech and assembly which undermine Jewish students’ civil rights to a college education free from discrimination.

Other speakers included Rabbi Levi Shemtov of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), Rabbi David Saperstein of Religious Action Center of Reform, and Kenneth S. Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate.

“Antisemitism is not just an age-old prejudice, it is a contemporary crisis manifesting on campuses across the nation,” Shemtov said. “As my father once taught me, it is not enough for people, especially for public figures, to not be antisemitic, we must be anti-antisemitic. We must demand the same of our universities and governmental institutions.”

Representing a civil libertarian viewpoint, Stern argued against codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into law and imposing punitive measures on college students and faculty accused of promoting antisemitism.

“Students, including Jewish students, have a right not to be victims of true threats, harassment, intimidation, bullying, discrimination, let alone assault. However, they should expect to hear ideas that cut them to their core,” Stern told the committee. “If we bludgeon the campus into submission, we risk destroying an institution that has made America the envy of the world.”

He continued, “I am more worried now that the campus tensions over [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] threaten higher education, as each side tries to silence the other. Pro-Palestinian activists sometimes use a heckler’s veto to promote academic boycotts and sometimes exclude Zionists from social spaces, which is almost always McCarthy-like and sometimes clearly antisemitic. But I’m more worried about the use of the law to silence pro-Palestinian speech.”

Stern also criticized US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) high-profile arrest and detainment of Mahmoud Khalil — a Columbia University alumnus who was an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover and other disturbances in the New York City area this semester — as “McCarthyism,” prompting a rebuke from HELP committee member Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).

“As you very well know, United States law says that a noncitizen is inadmissible for entry into this country if they, and I quote, ‘endorse or espouse terrorist activity or persuade others to do the same.’ That same law provides you can be removed for the same reasons,” Hawley responded. “That is what Mr. Khalil has been accused of. He has further been accused of, by the United States government, lying on his visa application. That on its own would be sufficient to remove him from this country.”

Hawley added that Khalil is named as a defendant in a new lawsuit which accuses him of “terrorizing and assaulting Jewish students, unlawfully taking over and damaging public university property, and assaulting Columbia University employees.” He then asked Stern, “You’re telling me that it’s McCarthyism to remove this individual?”

Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.

In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report which said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future. Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers.

The report also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.

Earlier this month, US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them.

The “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief, and the “Woke Endowment Security Tax Act (WEST)” would levy a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.

“The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton wrote on social media. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Jewish Leaders Discuss Campus Antisemitism, Trump Deportation Policy at US Senate first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israeli Strike on Tehran Kills Bodyguard of Slain Hezbollah Chief

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi lays a wreath as he visits the burial site of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, June 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

A member of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah was killed in an Israeli air strike on Tehran alongside a member of an Iran-aligned Iraqi armed group, a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters and the Iraqi group said on Saturday.

The source identified the Hezbollah member as Abu Ali Khalil, who had served as a bodyguard for Hezbollah’s slain chief Hassan Nasrallah. The source said Khalil had been on a religious pilgrimage to Iraq when he met up with a member of the Kataeb Sayyed Al-Shuhada group.

They traveled together to Tehran and were both killed in an Israeli strike there, along with Khalil’s son, the senior security source said. Hezbollah has not joined in Iran’s air strikes against Israel from Lebanon.

Kataeb Sayyed Al-Shuhada published a statement confirming that both the head of its security unit and Khalil had been killed in an Israeli strike.

Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli aerial attack on Beirut’s southern suburbs in September.

Israel and Iran have been trading strikes for nine consecutive days since Israel launched attacks on Iran, saying Tehran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Iran has said it does not seek nuclear weapons.

The post Israeli Strike on Tehran Kills Bodyguard of Slain Hezbollah Chief first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Hamas Financial Officer and Commander Eliminated by IDF in the Gaza Strip

Israeli soldiers operate during a ground operation in the southern Gaza Strip, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, July 3, 2024. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS

i24 News – The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in cooperation with the General Security Service (Shin Bet), announced on Friday the killing of Ibrahim Abu Shamala, a senior financial official in Hamas’ military wing.

The operation took place on June 17th in the central Gaza Strip.

Abu Shamala held several key positions, including financial officer for Hamas’ military wing and assistant to Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’ military wing until his elimination in March 2024.

He was responsible for managing all the financial resources of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, overseeing the planning and execution of the group’s war budget. This involved handling and smuggling millions of dollars into the Gaza Strip to fund Hamas’ military operations.

The post Hamas Financial Officer and Commander Eliminated by IDF in the Gaza Strip first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Report: Wary of Assassination by Israel, Khamenei Names 3 Potential Successors

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

i24 News – Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei named three senior clerics as candidates to succeed him should he be killed, the New York Times reported on Saturday citing unnamed Iranian officials. It is understood the Ayatollah fears he could be assassinated in the coming days.

Khamenei reportedly mostly speaks with his commanders through a trusted aide now, suspending electronic communications.

Khamenei has designated three senior religious figures as candidates to replace him as well as choosing successors in the military chain of command in the likely event that additional senior officials be eliminated.

Earlier on Saturday Israel confirmed the elimination of Saeed Izadi and Bhanam Shahriari.

Shahriari, head of Iran’s Quds Force Weapons Transfer Unit, responsible for arming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, was killed in an Israeli airstrike over 1,000 km from Israel in western Iran.

The post Report: Wary of Assassination by Israel, Khamenei Names 3 Potential Successors first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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