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The Australian Government Allowed Hate Speech Against Jews and Israel; Then a Synagogue Was Burned

Arsonists heavily damaged the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, on Dec. 6, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

Vandals defaced a synagogue in the Australian city of Melbourne in late November, with the phrases “Free Gaza” and “Jews kill babies.” A week later, in early December, two masked individuals deliberately burned down a different Melbourne synagogue, according to local police, who declared it to be an act of terrorism.

For Jews worldwide, it’s a short ride from inflammatory rhetoric to synagogues in flames.

Jacinta Allan, the premier of the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located, described the arson as an “act of antisemitism.” And Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, “I have zero tolerance for antisemitism. It has absolutely no place in Australia.”

But this is far from an isolated case in the country. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, more than quadruple the number over the previous 12-month period.

Just days ago, another antisemitic attack took place in Sydney. 

On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas launched the bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, demonstrators gathered outside the Sydney Opera House to bash Israel, with some shouting blatantly antisemitic slogans. There was some debate as to whether they were shouting “Gas the Jews” or “Where’s the Jews?” But after the Hamas massacre, the distinction means little.

Just days before the Melbourne arson attack, protestors, allegedly without permits, gathered across from The Great Synagogue of Sydney to protest an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Technion, Israel’s premier research university. For nearly three hours, the Jewish people there were locked down inside the synagogue out of fear for their personal safety.

The demonstrators shouted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing of Israel. The protestors held signs accusing Israel of war crimes, and claiming that the Australian prime minister has blood on his hands for not halting Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Then, when a Jewish man unfurled an Israeli flag across the street, facing Palestinian flags and banners calling for sanctions against Israel, the anti-Israel mob began aggressively shouting “shame” and “murderer” at him. Yet the police detained the pro-Israel pedestrian for endangering the peace by “antagonizing” the mob, not the unauthorized assembly.

In effect, the protestors used the pretext of human rights to harass Jews outside a synagogue. And several supposed human rights groups are producing materials that help protestors justify their hatred of the Jewish State and its supporters.

During this time, the Australian government has grown increasingly critical of Israel and its defensive war against Hamas — which culminated in Australia’s decision to reverse decades of policy, and vote for an extremely anti-Israel measure at the United Nations.

The same week as the Sydney synagogue heckling and the Melbourne synagogue arson, Amnesty International, the once-respected human rights organization, released a report contending that Israel had committed acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

This erroneous conclusion is flawed for several reasons. First, it rests on expanding what it calls an “overly cramped” standard for determining genocidal intent, the core of the crime. Second, it frames the war as an Israeli assault on Gazans even though Hamas initiated the fighting. Third, it misrepresents data about food insecurity in Gaza, which actually shows that Israel has taken significant steps to stave off starvation.

Fourth, it accepts Hamas’ overall casualty figures while omitting the number of Hamas fighters killed in the fighting, which — even using Hamas’ false numbers — would show a civilian-to-combatant death ratio in line with urban combat, not genocide. Fifth, it discounts Hamas’ use of human shields as a contributing factor to civilian deaths. And sixth, it dishonestly edits quotes from Israeli officials to suggest that they had genocidal intent when the opposite was true.

In truth, there’s many more than six reasons why the report is false and genocide isn’t happening; but no amount of the truth will convince people who are pre-determined to find Israel guilty.

This isn’t an exercise in seeking the truth. Amnesty produced its 296-page report with the intent to punish Israel and — by extension — its supporters. The report attempts to cast Israel as a uniquely evil state that must be dealt with accordingly.

This approach to the Jewish State feeds into a long history of antisemites casting the Jews as villains. In what has become known as the blood libel, medieval Christians in Europe accused Jews of killing Christian babies to use their blood for their Passover matzah. This framework justified all sorts of injustices against Jews, who were seen as bloodthirsty baby killers.

The details may have changed, but the accusations remain the same. The protestors outside synagogues in Australia, Amnesty International, and possibly the arsonists in Melbourne decry the Jewish State as a bloodthirsty child killer and want to stop it. Those casting aspersions against Israel are not overzealous defenders of human rights. Rather, they are modern purveyors of ancient blood libels portraying Jews — and now the Jewish State — as an embodiment of evil that must be destroyed. Australia and other nations should treat these vilifiers accordingly.

David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.

The post The Australian Government Allowed Hate Speech Against Jews and Israel; Then a Synagogue Was Burned first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with journalists onboard Air Force One en route to Miami, Florida, U.S., April 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura

The Trump administration reportedly plans to terminate $510 million worth of federal contracts and grants awarded to Brown University, according to media reports.

Brown University’s failure to mount a satisfactory response to the campus antisemitism crisis, as well as its embrace of the diversity, equity, and, inclusion (DEI) movement — perceived by many across the political spectrum as an assault on merit-based upward mobility and causing incidents of anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination — prompted the alleged pending action by the federal government, according to the right-leaning outlet The Daily Caller.

The announcement comes as Brown scrambles to cover a $46 million budget shortfall and other universities across the country have faced similar funding cuts.

Brown University officials, however, denied that the university had received any directives from the Trump Administration.

“We have no information to substantiate these rumors,” Brown University provost Francis Doyle issued a statement. “We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now.”

Meanwhile, Brown’s Jewish community rushed to the university’s defense, issuing a joint statement with the Brown Corporation which said that the campus is “peaceful and supportive campus for its Jewish community.”

The letter, signed by members of the local Hillel International chapter and Chabad on College Hill, continued: “Brown University is a place where Jewish life not only exists but thrives. While there is more work to be done, Brown, through the dedicated efforts of its administration, leadership, and resilient spirit of its Jewish community, continues to uphold the principles of inclusion, tolerance, and intellectual freedom that have been central to its identity since 1764.”

Brown Divest Coalition — an anti-Zionist group which recently saw its campaign for the university to adopt the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel defeated by the Brown Corporation — weighed in too, denouncing the reported cut as “a means of suppressing all forms of popular dissent to the renewed violence of the US war machine abroad.” US Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) also criticized the move, accusing the administration “of a broader pattern of behavior…that will negatively impact communities across the country and lead to layoffs, restrict research, and more.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Trump administration is following through on its threats to inflict potentially catastrophic financial injuries on colleges and universities deemed as soft on antisemitism or excessively “woke.” The past six weeks has seen the policy imposed on elite universities including Harvard and Columbia, rattling a higher education establishment that has for better and worse operated for decades with little interference from the federal government even as it polarized the public and contributed to a growing sense that elites are contemptuous of Americans who live outside of their cultural enclaves.

In March, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts and grants for Columbia University, a measure that secured the school’s acceding to a slew of demands the administration put forth as preconditions for restoring the money. Later, the Trump administration disclosed its reviewing $9 billion worth of federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard University, jeopardizing a substantial source of the school’s income over its alleged failure to quell antisemitic and pro-Hamas activity on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Princeton University saw $210 million of its federal grants and funding suspended too, prompting its president, Christopher Eisgruber to say the institution is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.”

Additionally,  60 universities are being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over their handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.

One of those universities, Northwestern University, on Monday touted its progress in addressing campus antisemitism, noting that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Belgium Joins Hungary in Rejecting ICC Warrant Against Netanyahu, Signaling Shift in International Stance

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 16, 2025. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS

Belgium announced it would not enforce the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza, should he visit Brussels—marking a significant shift from the government’s previous policies.

In an interview with Belgium’s VRT broadcaster on Thursday, Prime Minister Bart De Wever was asked about Hungary’s decision to not act on the ICC warrant against Netanyahu during the Israeli leader’s visit to Budapest this week.

“To be completely honest, I don’t think we would either,” De Wever said during the interview.

“There is such a thing as realpolitik, I don’t think any European country would arrest Netanyahu if he were on their territory. France wouldn’t do it, and I don’t think we would, either.”

As Hungary welcomed Netanyahu to Budapest with full military honors on Thursday, ignoring the ICC arrest warrant against him, the country also announced its decision to withdraw from the international court.

After their meeting, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he believes the ICC is “no longer an impartial court, not a court of law, but a political court.”

“I am convinced that this otherwise important international judicial forum has been degraded into a political tool, with which we cannot and do not want to engage,” Orban said during a press conference.

In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza war.

The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which until a recently imposed blockade had provided significant humanitarian aid into the enclave throughout the war.

Israel also says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, despite Hamas’s widely acknowledged military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.

Belgium’s center-right government, led by De Wever’s National Flemish Alliance party, took power this year after defeating a left-wing coalition led by the Socialist Party, known for its anti-Israel stance.

Under the previous government, Belgium joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

Last year, Belgium’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Petra De Sutter, said, “War crimes and crimes against humanity cannot go unpunished,” referring to the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu.

“Europe must comply. Impose economic sanctions, suspend the Association Agreement with Israel and uphold these arrest warrants,” De Sutter wrote in a post on X.

In line with this position, former Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in November that Belgium would “assume its responsibility” towards the ICC, emphasizing that “there can be no double standards.”

After the ICC’s decision to issue the warrants, several countries, including Hungary, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, France, and Italy, have said they would not arrest Netanyahu if he visited.

Germany seems to have a conflicting stance on this matter. During a press conference, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he could not imagine the ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu being executed during a potential visit to Berlin.

However, Germany’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, criticized Hungary’s refusal to enforce the arrest warrant against the Israeli leader this week.

“This is a setback for international criminal law,” Baerbock said during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.

“In Europe, no one is above the law. And this applies to all areas of law,” she said.

The post Belgium Joins Hungary in Rejecting ICC Warrant Against Netanyahu, Signaling Shift in International Stance first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Kanye West Releases Track List for New Album ‘WW3’ Featuring Songs About Hitler After Dressing In Full KKK Outfit

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, dressed in a full black leather KKK outfit during his interview with DJ Akademiks that was shared on YouTube on March 31, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, shared on Thursday the track list for a new album titled “WW3” and it includes songs with titles that reference Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The seventh track on the album is titled “Heil Hitler,” which is the greeting praising Hitler that given as part of the Nazi salute, while the eighth song is titled “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” The “Runaway” rapper, 47, has previously made comparisons between himself and Jesus, and said in an interview this week with DJ Akademiks:”I’m the closest thing to God on Earth and I act just like how God acts.” The musician and Yeezy creator has also repeatedly praised Hitler in interviews and on social media. In February, he wrote on X, “Hitler was sooooo fresh. Me loving Hitler is old news,” as well as ““Im a Nazi” and “I am God Jesus Hitler Ye Like I told you.”

Early Thursday morning, Ye posted on his X account a photo of a paper that features the names of the 11 songs on “WW3.” Also on the paper is a drawing of two black swastikas, which was the symbol of Hitler’s Nazi Party and is still used by white supremacists and extremists. There is also a song on the album titled “Bianca,” after his estranged wife Bianca Censori. In the song, which he revealed on a livestream with DJ Akademiks, the rapper give details about the Australian architect leaving him because of his recently unhinged and antisemitic social media posts. It’s been reported since mid-February that Censori left Ye and wants to divorce him because of his disturbing antics, which included selling a shirt with a swastika on it.

“She’s having a panic attack and she is not liking the way that I tweeted,” Ye raps in the song about Censori. “Until Bianca’s back I stay up all night I’m not going to sleep / I really don’t know where she’s at.”

The track list for Ye’s album “WW3.” Photo: X/Screenshot

Ye also shared on X the cover art for “WW3.” It features a man and a woman in red and white Ku Klux Klan robes. According to the music website Genuis, the photo was originally taken during a KKK wedding in a barn in Tennessee in July 2015, but was edited by Ye so that the man’s skin color is Black. The real like couple’s dog is also edited out of the image.

Ye – who has four children with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian – did an interview with DJ Akademiks earlier this week and when greeting the disc jockey at the start of their conversation, he wrote a necklace that featured an oversized, diamond encrusted swastika. Ye later changed into a black leather Ku Klux Klan outfit for the reminder of the interview. He said he wanted to wear the KKK ensemble the day before out in public but was worried “they would put me in the hospital for my outfit.”

Ye released last week on YouTube a song titled “WW3” in which he addresses his antisemitic comments on X and calls for him to be removed from the social media platform because of his hateful remarks. He also denies similarities to Hitler. “They tellin’ me that I’m a bully/I’m antisemitic, fully/They sayin’ I’m actin’ like Hitler/But how am I actin’ like Hitler?/When I am a f–king ni–a,” Ye raps in the song. “They tellin’ me, ‘Get up off of Twitter’ … Rockin’ swastikas ’cause all my ni–as Nazis/Readin’ ‘Mein Kampf,’ two chapters ‘fore I go to sleep.”

The post Kanye West Releases Track List for New Album ‘WW3’ Featuring Songs About Hitler After Dressing In Full KKK Outfit first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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