RSS
Ta-Nehisi Coates Jumps on the Anti-Israel Bandwagon Using Ignorance and Sympathy with Terrorists
Three things stand out in Ryu Spaeth’s 7000-word, flattering profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates in New York magazine.
Coates’ apparent blindness to any facts that don’t support his anti-Israel premise;
Coates’ desire for Jews to return to a state of powerlessness and vulnerability;
And the pretense that Coates has done something brave and daring, without regard to whether it will hurt his career.
Spaeth’s profile focuses on The Message, Coates’ new book, which has been released just in time for the one-year commemoration of October 7, 2023 — the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Unlike New York, my organization wasn’t given an advance copy of the book, so I must take Spaeth’s descriptions of Coates and his work on faith. But even in an otherwise fawning profile, Spaeth ever-so-gently points out that Coates doesn’t have a firm grasp on the events surrounding Israel’s re-establishment in 1948, and that the book overlooks “terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation,” and “intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades.”
Coates, at least according to Spaeth, is heavy on moral judgments, but light on history.
Spaeth writes of Coates, “the point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice of the occupation. ‘What is the experience that justifies total rule over a group of people since 1967?’ he asked me. ‘My mother knows that’s wrong.’”
Why Coates has invoked his mother isn’t clear, but perhaps his mother doesn’t know that Israel got into this situation as a result of a defensive war, or that Israel offered the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a state in 2000 — and many times before or since.
Perhaps his mother doesn’t know that former President Bill Clinton faults Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for rejecting the 2000 peace offer, or that the Palestinians again passed up independence in the West Bank in 2008, and again in 2014.
Perhaps she doesn’t understand that the walls and checkpoints in Israel are a response to terrorism. Perhaps she also doesn’t know that Israel’s experiment with unilateral withdrawal in Gaza was proven to be a failure by 2007, when Hamas started throwing its political opposition off of rooftops, and that this failure was confirmed with absolute certainty on October 7, 2023.
A better question is, does Coates know these things? Does he choose to ignore them?
Israel cannot get out of the West Bank by agreement, and cannot get out unilaterally, but Coates issues his moral condemnation freely, without regard to the facts.
Like others who promote the dissolution of the one Jewish state in the world, Coates feigns concern over the Holocaust.
On the topic of Yad Vashem he wrote, according to New York, “in a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?” And yet, he is also able to say, at the same time, “‘Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.’ Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.”
The statement is shocking as much for its ignorance as for its callousness.
The League of Nations Mandate “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was created in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
Moreover, about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from those who, after centuries of second-class status, fled or were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries. Does he realize that more than half of Israeli Jews would be considered “BIPOC” in the United States?
He also doesn’t seem to know that there would actually have been a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Arabs had accepted the 1947 Partition Plan. Instead, they — along with five Arab armies — tried to conquer the Jewish State, and kill or expel its Jewish residents.
More to the point, while it is not the Holocaust that entitles the Jews to a state, it was the Holocaust that opened many people’s eyes to the existential necessity of one.
But not Coates.
To the contrary, Coates, at least according to Spaeth’s telling, wants Jews returned to the stateless and powerless situation that were the predicate conditions for the Holocaust to occur.
After the above description of Yad Vashem, Spaeth writes, “but what Coates is concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went from being the conquered to the conquerors, when ‘the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong’….”
And later in the essay, he reiterates, “in [Coates’] hands, the story of Israel is a cautionary tale of the corrupting influence of power, a warning to the oppressed who might dream of one day exerting their will over an otherwise unkind world.”
And while many saw the events of October 7, 2023, as proof of what Hamas and other jihadist groups would like to do to Jews without the protection of the state of Israel, Coates — as he has in the past — excuses the attack in his interview with Spaeth: “‘part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison …. And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I’d be the person that says, “Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this”? Would that have been me?’”
The conceit of the New Yorker article, however, is that writing all of this about Israel is brave and risky for Coates, with the always-insightful Peter Beinart declaring that, “Ta-Nehisi has a lot to lose.”
Spaeth writes, “what matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now – to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. ‘I’m not worried,’ he told me, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am f***ing worthless.’”
In certain circles, Israel is today’s most fashionable bogeyman. Taking rhetorical aim at the Jewish State while it is under physical attack from multiple directions, is likelier than Coates’s unmade movie scripts to bring him more of the accolades and attention to which he seems to have become accustomed — certainly more so than the chapter of the book on Senegal will. (Just look at how much of the New York essay discusses Senegal.)
The type of one-sided analysis that New York describes can appeal only to the most uninformed of readers. Time will tell whether there are enough of them to make Coates’ book the success he seems to be looking for.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
The post Ta-Nehisi Coates Jumps on the Anti-Israel Bandwagon Using Ignorance and Sympathy with Terrorists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Antisemitic Incidents in the Netherlands Surge to Record Levels, New Report Finds
March 29, 2025, Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands: A pro-Palestinian demonstrator burns a hand-fashioned Israeli flag. Photo: James Petermeier/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in the Netherlands surged to alarming levels last year, according to a new report, which found that anti-Jewish incidents across the country reached a “worrying record” last year even after a historic spike following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) — a Dutch Jewish human rights organization that monitors antisemitism — on Thursday released its annual report on antisemitic incidents for 2024, showing an 11 percent increase over the previous all-time high recorded in 2023.
Last year, CIDI recorded 421 antisemitic incidents, a sharp increase from the average of 138 incidents per year the country had experienced from 2012 to 2022, prior to the Hamas-led onslaught on Israel and the ensuing Gaza war.
“This is the highest number since CIDI started keeping track of reports 40 years ago,” Naomi Mestrum, the organization’s director, said in a statement, adding that preliminary data from the first quarter of 2025 “suggests that the trend is continuing.”
In 2024 heeft het aantal antisemitische incidenten in Nederland een zorgwekkend record bereikt. Er werden 421 meldingen bij CIDI gedaan, een stijging van 11% t.o.v. 2023, dat al een historisch hoog aantal incidenten liet zien.https://t.co/IbOL4YHxnW pic.twitter.com/ffvJ5tTv1w
— CIDI
(@CIDI_nieuws) April 24, 2025
In the last two years, the number of antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands has surged by 305 percent compared to its average from 2012 to 2022, prompting local Jewish community leaders to call on authorities to take stronger action against the rising wave of antisemitic harassment following the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
According to the study, the Hamas-Israel war is often used as a justification for antisemitism. The report also observed a rise in antisemitic hate crimes in public settings, where visibly identifiable Jews were more frequently subjected to insults, threats, and intimidation.
“The most dramatic increases were seen in public spaces, where antisemitic incidents surged by 45 percent,” CIDI said in a statement. “Visibly Jewish individuals were increasingly subjected to verbal abuse, threats and harassment.”
Last year, Israeli soccer fans were violently attacked in Amsterdam after watching the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team compete against the Dutch club Ajax in a European League match. At the time, Femke Halsema, the city’s mayor, called the attackers “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” who went “Jew hunting.”
The 117-page document by CIDI also recorded a 44 percent increase in vandalism targeting Jewish property.
In several universities across the Netherlands, there has been a rise in anti-Israel protests where antisemitic slogans are frequently chanted. As a result of ongoing threats and intimidation, the report said Jewish students are increasingly avoiding classes.
According to the study, antisemitism has also spread across social media and other online platforms, with hateful messages and antisemitic stereotypes becoming more widespread and normalized.
“Social media algorithms play a major role in strengthening and spreading antisemitic ideas more quickly,” Mestrum said.
However, CIDI noted that its figures did not include social media activity, which it is investigating separately.
Regarding the 421 incidents recorded last year, the Dutch group said it received about 1,700 reports in total but only counted those it assessed as being “indisputably antisemitic.”
In light of its findings, CIDI urged for a “strong and consistent government response” to combat rising antisemitism and ensure the safety of the Jewish community.
“That means investing in education, but also a firm and visible approach to antisemitism in schools and social media, stopping subsidies to cultural institutions that exclude Jewish artists, banning terrorist and extremist groups that spread hatred, and implementing a zero-tolerance policy in the criminal prosecution of anti-Semitic crimes,” the statement read.
The Dutch government’s National Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism, Eddo Verdoner, called CIDI’s findings “shameful,” stating that antisemitic expressions are becoming increasingly common.
“I hear heartbreaking stories from children, students, and adults who are harassed and mocked because of their Jewish identity,” Verdoner wrote in a post on X. “They hide a Star of David necklace, don’t dare to wear a kippah, or conceal their Jewish background out of fear.”
The Netherlands, which saw the highest percentage of Jewish victims in Western Europe during World War II, with at least 75 percent of its Jewish population being murdered, is now home to approximately 40,000 Jews.
The post Antisemitic Incidents in the Netherlands Surge to Record Levels, New Report Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.