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New York Must Not Allow Cornell and Columbia to Jeopardize Jewish Students
An anti-Israel ‘apartheid wall’ on display at Columbia University during Apartheid Week in 2017. Photo: Facebook.
At New York’s most elite colleges, Jewish students are under siege.
Columbia and Cornell, the state’s two members of the prestigious Ivy League, have both failed their Jewish students — both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7, which was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Since the Hamas attack, a rising tide of unconcealed antisemitic harassment has flooded American and Western life, with students on college campuses being particularly targeted.
A rallying tool for the dehumanization of Jews — which also runs afoul of New York state law — is the set of referenda being organized at both schools to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish country, the State of Israel.
It is astonishing and unprecedented that the Jewish community is being targeted this way in New York, the most storied center of Jewish life in America, with the largest Jewish population of any US state: almost 2 million, about a quarter of the total American Jewish community, and at least 7% of the state’s population.
The state, led by Governor Kathy Hochul, must take action to halt the dangerous farce targeting our people.
The issue for these protestors isn’t Israel defending herself. They just have a problem with Jews, even dead ones. It’s as simple as that.
At Columbia, the antisemitic attacks started within hours of Hamas’ horrific invasion of Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent Israelis.
On October 16, one Jewish student was assaulted with a broomstick, fracturing his finger, as he hung posters of the more than 240 hostages abducted by Hamas. Other students were spat on for speaking Hebrew. Another Israeli student’s “phone number was leaked and she received aggressive and explicit text messages and phone calls for weeks.”
Despite this harassment, and at a time of record antisemitism in the US, Columbia is playing host to no fewer than five referenda calling for discriminatory treatment of, economic action against, and, in some cases, the genocidal elimination of the entire country of Israel.
Let’s be clear: calling for the state of Israel to be abolished is not calling for peace. These “protestors” are calling for war to the bitter end of the Jews, and, in fact, studies have demonstrated that campus-wide campaigns calling for the elimination of Israel result directly in an increase of anti-Jewish activity on campus.
Similarly, at Cornell, one student was arrested after he threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.” Another Cornell student posted, “Zionists must die!” on social media. A Cornell professor, Russell Rickford, at an October 15 anti-Israel rally, said that he found October 7 — which featured mass rape and genital mutilation — “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
And yet the Cornell Assembly has picked this time to pass a resolution calling for the university to make divestment recommendations to the Board of Trustees, implicitly singling out the State of Israel.
For years after World War II, American and Western leaders pledged they would “never again” allow the Jewish people to be targeted for slaughter; now, the new radicals are calling for the deconstruction of the only Jewish state.
New York law and policy are clear: New York agencies and authorities must divest all state funds invested in entities that engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activity against Israel. BDS is a strategy that the US State Department has recognized as a form of antisemitism.
Federal law prohibits discrimination against groups like Jews or Israelis, and an ongoing Federal lawsuit accuses Columbia of failing to intervene against antisemitism on campus. A similar lawsuit is being organized against Cornell. As if that wasn’t enough, both schools are facing Federal antisemitism inquiries from the US Education Department.
These are beyond challenging times for America’s Jewish community, which is experiencing an all-time high of antisemitic assaults, as global Jewry faces its most dangerous moment since World War II.
On American campuses, an astonishing 73% of Jewish college students say that they have now personally experienced or witnessed antisemitism just since the start of the school year. The level of attacks on our community is now truly pervasive, and civic leaders must not stand aside while our community is reeling.
Under such circumstances, and with the specific assaults and threats that have manifested at Columbia and Cornell, the New York state government and Governor Hochul must act immediately to protect Jewish students by intervening against the proposed ballot propositions delegitimizing Israel.
Noa Tishby is a New York Times best-selling author, and Israel’s former Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization.
The post New York Must Not Allow Cornell and Columbia to Jeopardize Jewish Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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