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Protestors Bring Violence, Vandalism, and More to College Campuses

Law enforcement clash with pro-Hamas demonstrators at the University of Michigan on Aug. 28, 2024. Photo: Brendan Gutenschwager/X

Violent anti-Israel protests continued in September, as new FBI statistics show that Jews were the most frequent targets of hate crimes in the US in 2023.

In Australia, pro-Hamas demonstrators including Students for Palestine, Extinction Rebellion, and Disrupt Wars fought with police outside a Melbourne arms fair; they also attacked police horses with acid and rocks, resulting in multiple injuries and arrests.

Thousands of protestors marched through Lower Manhattan in what organizers called “Flood NYC for Gaza,” waving Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian, and Syrian flags. The White House condemned the appearance of Hamas flags.

Other anti-Israel protests took place in New York City, in one case ostensibly in connection with the shooting of a knife wielding criminal on a subway platform, and with the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before his address to the United Nations.

In London and Edinburgh Barclays Bank branches were vandalized as was a Berlin Holocaust memorial with the words “Jews are committing genocide.”

In response to an April protest that shut down Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and delayed travelers, a public interest law firm filed a class action lawsuit against a variety of anti-Israel organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. BDS funders such as the Tides Center, its Community Justice Exchange, National Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, AJP Education Foundation, Inc., and the WESPAC Foundation, were included in the lawsuit.

On campus, the semester opened with a variety of anti-Israel protests and vandalism at schools across the country.

The most serious incident was an assault on a Jewish student at the University of Michigan, who was approached by a group, asked whether he was a Jew, and then beaten. T

The university president condemned the incident, but no suspects have been apprehended. A series of other assaults on Jewish students and a Jewish fraternity at the school occurred, but their motives are unclear. Two Jewish students were also attacked near the University of Pittsburgh campus.

Student anti-Israel protests were also held in Chicago and Bay Area universities, Columbia University, McGill University, and elsewhere. A number of protestors at the University of Michigan were arrested and will be prosecuted by the state.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) accused Democratic State Attorney General Dana Nessel of doing so because she is Jewish.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer initially declined to support the Attorney General’s decision, but later reversed course — and a group of House Democrats did so, apparently without naming Tlaib.

Elsewhere the Drexel University Chabad house was vandalized with “free Palestine” propaganda, while a mezuzah was torn down at Harvard from the door of a Jewish student.

Overall the ADL reports a 2,000% increase in antisemitic incidents on California campuses alone.

In a significant incident, members of the Baruch College Hillel were harassed by SJP members outside a midtown Manhattan restaurant, who shouted “Back to Brooklyn, out the Middle East” and “Where’s Hersh you ugly ass b***h?”

At Harvard University, Jewish and Israel-related events are now patrolled frequently by university police.

Across the country, vandalism of university property has become routine:

Pro-Hamas students vandalized a statue of Benjamin Franklin at the University of Pennsylvania, stating it was “a symbol of imperial violence and colonialism.”
A lawn at McGill University, which had been destroyed by anti-Israel protestors in the spring, was again torn up.
The ROTC building at the University of North Carolina was vandalized, and a Palestinian flag was raised.
George Washington University trustees’ homes were vandalized by the Student Coalition for Palestine.
Various landmarks at Georgetown University were vandalized, including with the Hamas triangle symbol.
A building at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities was vandalized with slogans including “Zionists off campus,” “Intifada is here,” and “glory to the resistance.”

Direct student harassment of Jewish faculty also renewed in September, including at the UC Berkeley law school, where students handed out flyers condemning a ‘Zionist’ professor outside of his class.

At MIT, pro-Hamas students harassed a talk by an Israeli professor and stole food provided for the event.

Students also resumed harassment of administrators, as at Pomona College, where dozens of protestors screamed outside the president’s house late at night.

Students arrested during a sit-in at Wesleyan University, whose president had written an op-ed praising campus protests, held a protest outside of his house. The Cornell University “Coalition for Mutual Liberation” disrupted a job fair and chanted “We will work, we will fight. No more jobs in genocide” and “F*** you Boeing.”

Anti-Israel students and faculty at the University of Minnesota marched in protest against that institution’s recently announced neutrality policy.

As has long been the case Students for Justice in Palestine is taking the lead in organizing anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protests on campus:

The National SJP announced a Week of Rage would begin on October 7.
The Rutgers University SJP chapter protested its suspension in front of an administration building, stating menacingly that it was “Strike Three” for the university.
At William and Mary College, the SJP chapter led a walkout and chanted “intifada revolution” and “we don’t want two states, take us back to ‘48.”
At the University of Minnesota, SJP protestors along with students from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), UMN Divest, and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) disrupted the inauguration of the school’s new president.
The Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition released a statement praising the Houthi missile attack on Israel, noting the support for the attack from Hamas, the PFLP, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and ending with “Glory to the resistance.”

Student governments also remain at the center of organizing campuses against Israel. At the University of Michigan, the student government voted again to hold the budget for various student groups hostage until the administration adopts BDS.

The UCLA student government also passed a resolution demanding the administration revoke its ban on encampments. The University of California at Santa Cruz voted to adopt a BDS policy with its own funds but delayed implementation when it discovered the move would violate state and Federal laws. In contrast, the McGill University Student Union revoked the club status of the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights group. The Cornell University SJP chapter was also denied recognition by the administration, as was the University of Illinois SJP chapter.

These positive steps were counterbalanced, however, by the restoration of the University of Wisconsin’s and Harvard’s pro-Hamas student groups.

Columbia University’s new president, Katrina Armstrong, also apologized to anti-Israel students who were “hurt” after New York police were forced to clear spaces they occupied during the spring semester. The refusal of New York University’s anti-Israel groups to participate in anti-discrimination and anti-harassment training sets up a confrontation with the administration.

After protests aimed against campus Hillel by SJP members, Baruch College attempted to block a campus Rosh Hashanah celebration. The Hillel director stated “We were told by the administration that the campus can’t guarantee the safety of Jewish students because of other agitators who want to hurt, intimidate or harass them.” The decision was reversed only after political pressure, including from Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY). The university denied the allegation.

After criticism, University of Maryland administrators denied the school’s SJP permission to erect an October 7th “commemoration of martyrs” on the school’s main plaza. CAIR and Palestine Legal have sued the university, claiming First Amendment rights have been violated.

Faculty members continue to take leading roles in anti-Israel protests, typically claiming they are there to protect their students and “defend free speech.”

A new report highlights the growing role of Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters in organizing campus protests. It notes that campuses with chapters were far more likely to have faculty helping students write statements and cosponsor events, in addition to producing anti-Israel and pro-Hamas statements from academic departments.

At Columbia, the second investigative report on antisemitism detailing incidents on campus was also met with hostility by faculty who claimed it was poorly researched and, more importantly, that the effort was in “bad faith” and “conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.”

For their part, University of Pennsylvania faculty joined anti-Israel students protesting outside the presidential debate held in Philadelphia last month.

The deep embedding of anti-Israel bias by faculty into courses through the selection of topics or readings remains difficult to perceive or counter. Challenges to overtly political and one-sided courses are invariably met with charges of censorship and that “academic freedom” is being defied.

The participation of faculty in straightforward indoctrination sessions held outside the classroom was exemplified by the “The People’s Conference For Palestinian Solidarity” at the University of Geulph, which included sessions aimed at high schoolers.

In another example, a faculty member at Wilfred Laurier University offered students extra credit for attending a pro-Hamas protest and drove students to the rally.

The sheer loathing for Israel embodied by some faculty was reflected in the appearance at Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies of United Nations special rapporteur and global antisemite Francesca Albanese. She reiterated her stance that the October 7 massacre was “legitimate resistance,” that Israel is a “military dictatorship,” and that Israeli operations are “genocidal.”

K-12 Students

One of the most notable developments in the new school year is lawfare from CAIR and its partners directed against antisemitism training.

The San Francisco Unified School District was forced to reschedule antisemitism training for teachers after anti-Israel groups including CAIR, and Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area (JVP), as well as the BDS supporting union, United Educators of San Francisco, objected to the involvement of the ADL, American Jewish Committee, and the local Jewish community.

Evidence also continues to emerge of teachers conspiring to evade oversight and directly indoctrinate students against Israel.

Video emerged of Los Angeles teachers discussing methods to bring “pro-Palestine” content into lessons, transport students to rallies, and avoid getting fired.

Teachers also continue to manipulate students into participating in anti-Israel activities.

In Toronto, middle school students were forced to participate in a march for “Palestine” after being told they were going to “observe” an event having to do with Canada’s First Nations.

Jewish students were also told to wear blue in order to identify themselves as “colonizers.” A Jewish student who expressed discomfort was told, “You’ll get over it” by a teacher.

The author is a contributor to SPME, where a significantly different version of this article was first published.

The post Protestors Bring Violence, Vandalism, and More to College Campuses first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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