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Monday Marks Day 445 for Hostages in Gaza — Longer Than the Iranian Hostages

People gather in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv to mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Photo: Paulina Patimer

On November 4, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s henchmen stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for 444 days, releasing them on January 20, 1981. On October 7, 2023, Hamas storm troopers and Gazan civilians paraglided and marched into Israel and took hundreds of American and Israeli hostages after killing over 1,200.

Comparing the two situations shows how much has changed in the last four decades — none of it for the better.

Hostages, Then and Now

The Americans taken hostage by Khomeini’s followers were all adults working at the US embassy. The captives in Gaza today, both male and female, range from infants to the aged. One hostage, Kfir Bibas, born on January 18, 2023, was only 262 days old when he was stolen from his bed. He celebrated his first birthday as a hostage and has spent the majority of his life as a Hamas prisoner.

Some of the American diplomats were beaten during and after the November 4 siege of the U.S. embassy. They were undoubtedly held in inhumane conditions and sometimes threatened with execution. But unlike those seized on October 7, not one was executed. Not a single one was raped.

After the first few days of their captivity, unless they were being moved from one location to another or paraded in the street, the American diplomats were not blindfolded. Aside from when they were kept periodically in a damp, windowless warehouse on the embassy grounds, which the hostages named “The Mushroom Inn,” they could see outside.

Hamas’ hostages, on the other hand, have likely been kept underground in the maze of tunnels that constitute subterranean Gaza for most of their 445 days of captivity. Many have likely not seen the sun in all that time. They have been severely beaten.

On November 17, 1979, Khomeini ordered the female and African-American hostages released because “Islam has a special respect toward women” and because blacks had been forced to suffer “under American pressure and tyranny.” Some of the women released by Hamas in the November 2023 ceasefire were sexually assaulted and constantly intimidated.

Those Americans held by Iran who were injured or ill received medical care, albeit inferior to what they deserved. One hostage, Richard Queen, the State Department’s Vice Consul, suffering the early stages of undiagnosed multiple sclerosis, was released after 250 days. His symptoms baffled the Iranian physicians who treated him, and his captors feared the consequences of his dying in captivity. Hamas has no such fears.

UN Responses, Then and Now

In 1979, the United Nations was not quite as corrupted as it is today. The Security Council responded if not quickly (on December 4) at least decisively with Resolution 457 calling for the immediate release of the hostages. On December 31, it issued Resolution 461, condemning Iran and citing an International Court of Justice order for the release of all hostages.

In 2023, after weeks of failing to reach a consensus, the Security Council finally issued Resolution 2712 on November 15, calling for the release of all hostages, but it did not condemn or even mention the October 7 attack.

Today’s UN is focused on condemning Israel. It has whitewashed the complicity of the Palestinian people in October 7 and exaggerated their suffering. The Secretary-General’s statement was one half condemnation of Hamas and one-half warning that Israel exercise “maximum restraint” and pursue a “two-state solution.” The International Court of Justice took South Africa’s charges of genocide seriously and opened an investigation into Israeli conduct, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Media Coverage

In 1979, the media at first repeated the false narrative that the hostage takers were merely religious students, not Khomeini’s agents carrying out his will. But as one hostage, Barry Rosen, put it, “Khomeini was supporting our captivity; it was not just these students acting in his name.” Rosen adds that, “the students couldn’t have continued to hold us without the Imam’s approval.”

Throughout the 444-day ordeal, the media focused on the hostages, their families, and efforts being made to free them. On ABC, Ted Koppel’s career was made by a show called The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, which eventually became Nightline.

By contrast, today’s media have not made the hostages the focal point of the story. Rather than seeing the hostages as victims of Islamist aggression, much of today’s media are more sympathetic with Palestinians and Hamas than with their hostages. They focus on “Israel’s War in Gaza,” celebrate anti-Israel protests, and mindlessly repeat Hamas’s inflated casualty and death statistics.

When Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the media harped on how much more difficult a “hostage deal” would be and accused Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu of belligerence.

When Israel decimated (or more) the leadership of Hezbollah — another terrorist organization responsible for holding Americans hostage — in a brilliant pager/walkie-talkie sabotage like something out of a James Bond movie, much of the media vilified it as terrorism.

Like the UN, the media have whitewashed the complicity of the Palestinian people on October 7. One of the greatest differences between the coverage of the hostages held in Iran 45 years ago and of the hostages in Gaza today is that no one was on Iran’s side then, while many are on Hamas’s side today.

Academia Reacts

For Americans, and indeed for much of the Western world, the seizure of our diplomats in 1979 was an affront too outrageous to endure. People were angry at the Iranians, Khomeini, and Jimmy Carter. In the days before memes, Americans adopted a line from a popular song by Tony Orlando and Dawn (“Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”). Yellow ribbons appeared around trees throughout the nation as symbols of their suffering and the American people longing for their return.

Most American academics were as outraged as everyone else in 1979, and all but the most virulently anti-American among them who weren’t outraged likely kept it to themselves.

By contrast, today’s academics are more likely to celebrate October 7, especially Middle East studies “experts.”

College students were firmly on the side of the US in 1979. If there were any protests, they were anti-Iran protests. As a freshman at the University of Miami in November of 1979, I saw many cars sporting the famous bumper sticker, and people wearing the t-shirt, featuring Mickey Mouse holding an American flag in his right hand while giving the middle-finger salute with his left hand with the caption “Hey Iran.”

By contrast, today’s college students are more likely to wear keffiyehs and chant “From the River to the Sea” or “Globalize the Intifada” and other slogans they don’t understand.

End of the Crises

The 52 Americans held in Iran were released only after one-term president Jimmy Carter left the White House and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Reagan called Khomeini and his henchmen “criminals and thugs” and promised a very different approach than the weak coddling that the Carter administration had pursued.

When the hostages were finally released, there was a ticker-tape parade in their honor as they were celebrated in New York City’s “Canyon of Heroes.”

Will the hostages in Gaza have to wait until one-term president Joe Biden leaves the White House and Donald Trump is inaugurated? That will make it 472 days in captivity. Will there be a ticker-tape parade?

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to get the hostages back and threatened that “there will be hell to pay” if they are not returned by his January 20 inauguration. It will be well-deserved if Hamas doesn’t release the hostages.

Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was published by IPT.

The post Monday Marks Day 445 for Hostages in Gaza — Longer Than the Iranian Hostages first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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I Graduated UCLA in May; But My Fight for Israel On and Off Campus Has Just Begun

Law enforcement officers clear out a pro-Hamas protest encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Los Angeles, California, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Swanson

It has been six months since I graduated from UCLA, and my life looks a lot different now than it did as a Bruin.

The shift from being a student — a title that brought me immense pride and purpose — to navigating the uncertainty of a post-grad life has been both freeing and disorienting. This period of uncertainty, paired with the endless opportunities it presents, looms over me daily as I navigate the “figuring-it-out” chapter of my young twenties.

Yet amid the consistent changes and challenges of this transition, I’ve noticed glimpses of an unfamiliar sense of calm. At first, I couldn’t identify its source — it wasn’t as though life after graduation had suddenly become easier. But on the anniversary of October 7 — a day meant solely for grief, honor, and respect — the feeling made sense.

UCLA administrators continue not to enforce the changes they said they’ve made — such as time, place, and manner policies or a Four-Point Plan for a “safer and stronger” community — to conduct on campus, thereby allowing disruptive anti-Israel protests to continue.

However, reading about the Students for Justice in Palestine protest in the news felt starkly different than experiencing it on campus. For the first time in a year, there was a degree of separation between my heartbreak over what my community continues to endure, and the false narratives and blatant antisemitism perpetuated on college campuses.

The chants of “365 days of genocide” and “Israel is a terrorist state” felt no less painful this year, but I wasn’t forced to face them in person.

This distance did not make the commemoration of October 7 any less excruciating, nor does it make the image of 100 hostages continuing to be tortured underground any less vivid. It does not lessen the frustration of watching a preparatory emergency exit video at my temple during the High Holidays, or the anger that political leaders continue to advocate for ceasefires and two-state solutions while Hamas militants are embedded within UNRWA’s school systems.

But not having to worry about being blocked from the library or hearing “From the River to the Sea” echo across campus minutes before taking a final exam has made every day since graduation feel a little bit lighter. I’ve also noticed something else — or, more accurately, the absence of something. What happened to the flurry of social media posts my peers once shared about the campus protests and the ongoing war?

Unfortunately, their silence isn’t due to newfound understanding or engagement with Jewish perspectives; it’s because they no longer feel the pressure of social capital or the need to perform activism for an audience. Since they are no longer students and therefore the issue no longer directly affects them, they no longer need to utilize social media as a way to gain validation in the echo chamber of university life. While it’s been a relief to no longer see these posts, the fact that such harmful narratives were so casually spread and normalized remains deeply troubling.

Just because I am no longer facing anti-Jewish behavior on campus head-on — or seeing my peers’ constant posts — doesn’t indicate in the slightest that the fight is over. For Jews around the world, “Never Forget” means that we must always remember our people’s darkest moments on their darkest days. Our right to defend ourselves is a matter of life and death, not a symbolic gesture to project morality.

The tradition of Hanukkah shows us that it is indeed possible to remain hopeful and resilient, especially when it seems impossible. As the story goes, there was only enough oil to keep the Temple’s menorah burning for one day, but the flame miraculously stayed alight for eight. It is imperative to keep the memory of that miracle alive not only as an ode to our history, but also as a reminder that miracles can happen when we remain committed to being unapologetically Jewish.

Hanukkah means “dedication.” Judah the Maccabee’s fight against the Greek occupation of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem allowed for its rededication, ensuring that Jewish faith and culture would endure. Though I am no longer a college student, I am committed to rededicating my passion for Jewish advocacy.

Whether through writing, my pursuit of a legal education, or engaging with my community, I will continue to use my voice to challenge antisemitism and ensure that the flame of our history and hope burns brighter than ever.

Emily Samuels is a recent graduate of UCLA.

The post I Graduated UCLA in May; But My Fight for Israel On and Off Campus Has Just Begun first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Social Studies 2024: Phobe Maltz Bovy’s year in nine big vibe-shifts

What happened in the past 12 months? Rather a lot! So to pare it down, I’m limiting this end-of-year recap to things that kept popping up on my own finite radar, with an emphasis on those with relevance to Jewish Canadians. I will not ask whether I missed anything; assume that I have missed—or skipped over—a ton. These are just a handful of the stories about our society I see as relevant going into 2025 and beyond.

Campus protest culture camps out

The encampment trend that took hold at Columbia University and wound up all over the place—including at numerous Canadian schools—became the big story of 2024 for Jewish media and points beyond, the bold, in-your-face sign that the next generation of cultural elites had made Palestine their cause. Or a sign of something else? Not all the student protesters were students; some were professors, others unaffiliated. And the students not on board with the goings-on were very possibly more likely to demonstrate this by going to class than by organizing a counter-demonstration, although the Jewish professor at least temporarily banned by Columbia showed up at the University of Toronto.

Literary world is purging ‘Zionists’

First, a small magazine called Guernica had a meltdown when an Israeli writer, Joanna Chen, wrote an arguably pro-Palestinian essay, but did so while being, you know, Israeli. Chen had refused to serve in the IDF, but she was still too Zionistic for the pages in question. Next up, author Joshua Leifer tried to do a book event for his Tablets Shattered, but a Brooklyn bookstore employee cancelled it just as it was about to start.

Why was this critical-of-Israel book a problem? The interlocutor was going to be a liberal Zionist and one can’t be having that. The books-and-essays world, once a place where Jewish authors once felt reasonably comfortable in North America, now had spreadsheets identifying authors based on indicators of their relationship to Israel.

Searching for signals of antizionism

Look, Diaspora Jews have gone off Israel! No, wait, they’re all-in on Israel, and that’s why they’re buying guns and going to vote for Donald Trump! But then we learned that Jewish Canadians—like our American counterparts—arevirtually unanimous in the belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.

(And in similarly shouldn’t-be-surprising news, American Jewish voters overwhelmingly preferred Kamala Harris.)

Tradwives are totally taking over

The concept went from a niche online subculture to mainstream news and just incessant critical coverage. Tradwife this, tradwife that, all to the bafflement of actual traditionalist brides, Jewish and otherwise, if they were even online enough to notice, that is. A tradwife, for the uninitiated, is a social media influencer who posts content wherein she performs being a gender-role-conforming old-school housewife. She’s in something low-cut and she serves her man, but to own the libs, not (allegedly) to titillate straight men of any which politics.

Challah baking has become political

Some baked it to connect with fellow Jews througn established community channels, while others took, shall we say, a different tack.

Yes, 2024 was the year Chatelaine, a Canadian general-interest women’s magazine, published, then quasi-unpublished, an article about baking challah to free Palestine. In an awkward twist, the personal essayist wore an inverted red triangle in the accompanying author photo. This—combined with the content of the essay in question, an essay that didn’t merely criticize Israel’s response to Oct. 7 (which, fair) but erase the fact that Oct. 7 even happened—suggested that maybe it was one of those red triangles. One gesturing at, perhaps, a spot of friendliness towards Hamas.

War of the sexes (cont’d.)

The latest discourse began with the revelation that young men world over are veering to the right, young women to the left. Had women all gone off men? No. But a bunch gestured at plans to do so once Trump won a second go at the U.S. presidency.

And as someone who recently finished writing a book about straight women (to be published by Signal, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada), I have been kept plenty busy.

Reviving the concept of ‘shiksa’

Yes, the Netflix series Nobody Wants This offered a heartwarming rom-com treatment of the extremely adorable scenario of a Jewish man finally being spared the ghastliness that is Jewish women when a bubbly blonde comes his way. Can an ambiguously-Reform rabbi date a woman played by Kirsten Bell? In 2024, anything was possible.

The new death of wokeness

Left-wing illiberalism of the sort that brought us cancel culture is officially passé according to enough big thinkers out there.

Wokeness ain’t actually over yet

There’s also enough evidence to suggest ‘woke’ didn’t go anywhere, but rather transformed and migrated. The transformed bit goes like this: In lieu of a series of current things—individual social-justice concerns that were suddenly the only thing that mattered, only to be displaced by a different one five minutes later—there’s now the omnicause. You can plaster your backpack or coffee shop window or social media bio with a potentially endless set of concerns, as long as they all align, omnicausally speaking.

The migrated one: In a sense, there may have been some geographic migration. Maybe you can’t be cancel-cultured in the States as much as was once the case, but in Canada there are still good old-fashioned campaigns to shut down literary magazines for purity-politics reasons. But when I speak of migration, I mean primarily virtual. Twitter begat X, which in turn begat Bluesky. In layman’s terms, a social media platform that had once been the preferred gathering space of journalists, academics, and sui generis social-media pundits ceased serving that function once Elon Musk took over in October 2022, not all at once but in stages. X, what Twitter is now called, because nigh unusable, a pay-to-play scheme wherein right-wing rage-bait rules the day.

So a bunch of old-Twitter’s so-called power users (dubious honour) migrated, no, fled to a Twitter clone called Bluesky. I wrote a less than rave review of it in the Globe and Mail, which caused the Good folks who love love love Bluesky to anoint me main character. I was even parodied by Canada’s persistent cousin to The Onion with the assumption that the readership understood who they were referring to.

Shortly thereafter, everyone mad at me forgot about this, as actually prominent people arrived on Bluesky and became the source of fury that made what I elicited look like small potatoes (or perhaps I mean smol beans).

The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.

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Letter from Jasper: This hanukkiah miraculously survived Alberta’s summer wildfire

Warren Waxer has lived in Jasper, Alta., since 1980. His home, along with 358 others, was destroyed in the wildfire that roared through the town from July 22-24, 2024. Very little survived the intense flames—even his car keys were found melted in the rubble, he told The CJN. But as professional crews scoured the razed house, he writes, they uncovered one treasured object.

Three weeks after the wildfire that swept through Jasper National Park and the townsite, Team Rubicon arrived and got to work. Team Rubicon is a humanitarian group, led by military veterans, that helps clean up after disasters. Wearing hazmat suits and breathing masks, this group safely sifts through the ash and debris—the remains of people’s homes and businesses.

Other than the charred hulks of the furnace, fridge and stove, we couldn’t see much that could be salvaged, and we weren’t far wrong. When you see a couple of shiny metal parallel stripes on the grass where your aluminum ladder once was, you can’t be too hopeful.

The Jasper wildfire of July 2024 destroyed everything in its path, including Warren Waxer’s home.

Each item or partial item that the team recovered would be scrubbed of possible contaminants and was then presented us, the homeowners. We were handed a 35mm camera with the glass lens dripping out the front, shattered bits of marble sculpture, singed bits of pottery, and… wait, what’s that?

Our Hanukkah menorah!

A little worse for wear, listing backwards, missing a couple of nights and the shamash holder, but there it was, proud and defiant. From a fire that destroyed anything made of soft metal, somehow, this menorah lived to celebrate another Hanukkah. 

It had been a bad month realizing that treasured memorabilia and family keepsakes were most likely gone. Looking at the basement that was now filled knee-deep with ash and the charred remains of a two-storey house, it was hard to be optimistic. The fact that the menorah survived has boosted our spirits considerably. It has also boosted the status of this menorah from perfectly serviceable (albeit unremarkable) to treasured family heirloom. Not bad for a small-town menorah.

The menorah that survived the wildfire in Jasper, Alta. (Credit: Warren Waxer)

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