Shai Davidai speaking at rally in support of Israel, held gather in Washington Square Park, New York, NY, on September 8, 2024.  Photo: Lily Ride via Reuters Connect

Columbia University is being called on to respond to accusations that it has enabled the proliferation of antisemitic and pro-terror ideologies on campus.

“Dear Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia University,” Professor Shai Davidai, a faculty member who is one of the most renown pro-Israel activists in higher education, wrote in an open letter published on the X social media platform. “At some point your bulls—t needs to be called out. At some point, your silence must be addressed. Why haven’t you said anything about CU Apartheid Divest, the faculty supported organization that operates like an ideological terrorist cell? (They would never strap-on a suicide belt, but they praise and support those who do).”

Shai then enumerated a slew of grievances regarding the university’s handling of pro-Hamas and anti-Zionist extremists, including its declining to ever disavow Middle East Studies professor Joseph Massad, who praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and described the men who paraglided into the Nova Music Festival to murder the young people there as “the air force of the Palestinian resistance.” He also cited the university’s allowing pro-Hamas students to crash a memorial service for the men, women, and children who Hamas murdered on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.

“You know perfectly well that they aren’t criticizing Israel’s policies. You know perfectly well that they’re criticizing its existence,” he continued. “It doesn’t take much to say that praising the death of Israelis is unacceptable. Silence isn’t violence, but it surely enables it. And true leaders never remain silent. Shame on you for not saying anything. Shame on you for your silence.”

The Algemeiner has asked Columbia University to respond to Davidai’s allegations and will update this story if the school responds.

Davidai’s missive follows 15 months of explosions of antisemitic hatred and extremism on Columbia University’s campus, a trend which began immediately after the Oct. 7 massacre. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, the treatment to which pro-Israel Jewish students, faculty, and staff have been subjected since that day is unprecedented in the school’s history. Jewish students have been beaten up, battered with hate speech, and even prevented from publicly promoting their own self defense.

The professor, a native of Israel, has himself been allegedly persecuted for criticizing the university’s alleged indifference to the proliferation of pro-Hamas sentiment.

Columbia launched an investigation of Davidai in February, several months after he described former university president Minouche Shafik as a “coward” for coddling pro-Hamas activists who, after the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, waged a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and violence to demoralize Jewish students and pressure the university into boycotting Israel. The immediate cause cited for the inquiry, as told to The Algemeiner by the professor, was a series of spurious accusations that his denunciations of mass casualty events inspired by jihadist extremism equated to racism against Muslims and minorities of color.

Undeterred by what appeared to Davidai and his lawyers as a cynical attempt to use the disciplinary system to silence a political dissident and shroud him in suspicion, the professor continued advocating for Israel’s existence and Jewish civil rights all the way up to the first anniversary of Oct. 7, a day which saw dueling demonstrations held by pro-Hamas and pro-Israel students across the campus. It also saw a fateful exchange of words between Davidai and a Columbia administrator, Cas Holloway, whom the professor reproached for permitting pro-Hamas students to use the Oct. 7 anniversary for celebrating the terrorist organization’s atrocities, which included wantonly murdering Israelis, sexually assaulting Jewish women, and kidnapping over 200 hostages.

Columbia and Davidai’s legal team interpreted what transpired between the professor and Holloway differently. Davidai defended his approach as a genuine expression of grief and concern for the welfare of Jewish students, while Columbia felt that an unmoored professor had engaged in “threats of intimidation, harassment, or other threatening behavior.” Following the incident, Columbia “temporarily” banned him from campus, a severe disciplinary sanction which to this day prevents him from attending university functions and accessing his office.

The professor is not the first to accuse the university of inadequately responding to the misconduct of pro-Hamas activists.

In August, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce denounced school officials for punishing only a few of the anti-Zionist activists who last spring occupied an administrative building and staged a riot which prompted the university to advise Jews to refrain from coming to campus. According to documents shared by the committee, 18 of the 22 students who were given disciplinary charges for their role in the incident were later upgraded to “good standing” despite the university’s earlier pledge to expel them. Another 31 of 35 who were suspended for illegally occupying the campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” were restored to good standing as well.

Amnestying those students was “disgraceful and unacceptable,” former education committee chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said at the time.

“The vast majority of the student perpetrators remain in good standing,” she added. “By allowing its own disciplinary process to be thwarted by radical students and faculty, Columbia has waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who participated in these unlawful actions.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Columbia University Professors Calls on President to Denounce Pro-Terror Activism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro meets with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, Oct. 24, 2024. Photo: Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

Iran has congratulated Nicolás Maduro for beginning his third term as Venezuela’s president, despite international outcry over what many leaders have described as an “illegitimate” presidency only won through a “desperate attempt” to seize power.

The Iranian government sent its best wishes to Maduro and vowed to strengthen ties with Venezuela, describing their bilateral relationship as a way to stand up to the United States.

“Congratulations to President #NicolasMaduro on his inauguration into office as President of the Bolivarian Republic of #Venezuela,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said in a post on X/Twitter on Saturday. “We wish him all the success in serving his great people & country and are looking forward to working with the elected government for the good of our nations in furtherance of Iran-Venezuela’s extensive bilateral ties.”

Congratulations to President #NicolasMaduro on his inauguration into office as President of the Bolivarian Republic of #Venezuela.

We wish him all the success in serving his great people & country and are looking forward to working with the elected government for the good of our… pic.twitter.com/FVmKecZqrp

— Esmaeil Baqaei (@IRIMFA_SPOX) January 11, 2025

Baghaei then said that Iran will stand by Venezuela in opposition to the US government.

“Iran stands in solidarity with Venezuelan people and government in the face of malign interventions and unilateral coercive measures led by the United States,” he said.

Maduro on Friday began his third term as Venezuela’s president, despite US Secretary of State Antony Blinken referring to his “illegitimate presidential inauguration in Venezuela” as a “desperate attempt” to seize power.

“The Venezuelan people and world know the truth — Maduro clearly lost the 2024 presidential election and has no right to claim the presidency,” Blinken said in a statement. “The United States rejects the National Electoral Council’s fraudulent announcement that Maduro won the presidential election and does not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the president of Venezuela.”

Opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia should have been sworn in as the Venezuelan president, according to the US State Department.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar agreed, posting on X/Twitter that the Jewish state “expresses concern over the political persecution and arbitrary arrests by the regime and joins the call of many in the international community to restore freedom and democracy in Venezuela.”

“Today, Jan. 10, Edmundo González Urrutia, the elected president of Venezuela, who won the presidential elections by a significant majority, was supposed to be inaugurated,” Sa’ar added. “However, the election results are not being respected, and his inauguration is not taking place. The ruler, Nicolás Maduro, an ally of Iran, must honor the will of the people in his country.”

US President-elect Donald Trump also lambasted Maduro after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado — who emerged from months of hiding last week to join anti-Maduro protesters in the capital city of Caracas and demand that González be sworn in instead — was briefly detained by government security forces.

“Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado and President-elect Gonzalez are peacefully expressing the voices and the will of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime,” Trump wrote on social media. “These freedom fighters should not be harmed, and must stay safe and alive.”

According to reports, Machado was forced to record several videos before she was released, although details of those recordings remain unclear and Maduro’s supporters have denied that the opposition leader was arrested.

Meanwhile, Iran is also increasing its military presence in Venezuela, with some members of the country’s elite even acquiring properties in the Latin American country and being offered political asylum should they need it, The Latin Times reported on Friday.

Iran has reportedly established a drone development base at the El Libertador air base in Venezuela, where training for Venezuelan military personnel also takes place in addition to the production and training in the use of a wide range of unnamed aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The two countries have also strengthened economic ties in recent years, such as Iran’s Mahan Air making direct flights between Caracas and Tehran. According to Infobae, a Spanish-language Argentine online newspaper, these flights have been used to violate international sanctions by transporting Venezuelan gold in exchange for Iranian oil.

The US and allied countries have imposed heavy sanctions on both Iran and Venezuela for a range of illicit activities, from human rights violations to supporting terrorist groups.

In 2021, for example, the US Justice Department announced charges against Iranian intelligence agents for plotting to kidnap an American citizen, journalist Masih Alinejad, in the US and take her by boat to Venezuela before forcibly returning her to Iran, where she was born.

Iran’s latest expression of support for Venezuela came about two weeks after a senior adviser to the Iranian health minister said that one of Iran’s top foreign policy priorities will be working to enhance its relationship with Cuba across several domains and to expand cooperation with Latin American countries more broadly.

Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela have all continued looking for ways to combat US sanctions, which are only expected to become harsher when Trump enters office on Jan. 20.

It is unclear if Iran will end up pursuing a relationship with Venezuela to resist US sanctions in a formalized way as it has with Russia.

Iranian and Russian leaders have been working on an initiative to form an international alliance against US sanctions known as the International Union Against US Sanctions. An Iranian lawmaker spearheading the effort said last month that it will soon be completed.

The post Iran Congratulates Maduro on Inauguration, ‘Stands in Solidarity’ With Venezuela Against US ‘Coercive Measures’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The Royal Ontario Museum’s new exhibition has arrived just in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of a concentration camp where 1.1 million men, women and children, were murdered, almost all of them Jews.

Auschwitz. Not Long ago. Not Far Away. features 500 artifacts—including items from pre-war Germany and Poland—as well as video testimony from survivors liberated on Jan. 27, 1945.

Its only Canadian stop will be in Toronto, at a time when knowledge about the Holocaust is fading, and demonstrators have yelled ‘Go back to Europe’ at Jewish people during protests against Israel.

The day before the official opening on Jan. 10, a lone protester marched in front of the ROM, with a sign that read ‘Gaza. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,’ satirizing the name of the show.

It’s a fraught moment to launch a multi-million-dollar exhibit about the Holocaust, but the museum CEO and director Josh Basseches says the time is right for the exhibit.

The museum surveyed the public before committing to the show and found interest was as high as a blockbuster exhibit on dinosaurs, Basseches said in an interview with The CJN.

“If anything, interest in the show went up after Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, and the subsequent, ongoing war in Gaza.

“It’s a sobering exhibit. Having the opportunity to understand about an event like this at a place like the ROM, which feels for many as a safe, comfortable place to be, makes it something that people want to do,” he said.

“The treatment is quite sensitive, it avoids sensationalism. It doesn’t have some of the most visceral and disturbing issues, because we wanted to make this an exhibition that could engage people of a wide variety of ages, and from any sort of different background…. As we move further from the Holocaust, whether you are Jewish, or not Jewish, the idea of being a witness, of being aware of an understanding of what happened, feels to me profoundly important.”

Between 325,000 and 350,000 people are expected to visit the Auschwitz exhibit, Basseches said. In 2017, the museum mounted The Evidence Room, an exhibit that, replicated the architecture of Auschwitz to demonstrate that the Nazis deliberately constructed and operated the extermination camp. That show received about 250,000 visitors.

 Auschwitz, which runs until Sept. 1, is housed in the angular Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The first object visitors encounter in the gallery area is a woman’s red dress shoe, brought by an unknown deportee to the camp. Along the wall are the concrete fence posts, at one time strung with electrified wire, that defined the boundaries of Auschwitz.

As Basseches promises, the exhibit largely shies away from the most grotesque photos of starving prisoners and piles of corpses.  Instead, the artifacts of deportees and the physical remains of the concentration camp, as well as video testimonies from survivors, explain the story of Auschwitz.

The display winds through the fourth-floor space, starting with the history of the town of Oswiecim, Poland, where Auschwitz was built, and the political and economic instability that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

Artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and 20 other institutions trace the persecution of Jews, and others, including the disabled, homosexuals and the Roma people, as well as their desperate attempts to find refuge outside Europe.

The show culminates with mass deportations in cattle cars, and ultimately the fate of prisoners sentenced to slave labour in the satellite camps, and death in the gas chambers and crematorium. Suitcases, broken eye glasses and household objects including a cheese grater, brightly painted mugs and spoons, which were all confiscated when people arrived in Auschwitz are displayed. A small, scuffed child’s shoe and sock are placed in their own glass display case.

Photographs of camp commander Rudolf Hoss’ children splashing in a pool outside the camp gates as well as mug shots of prisoners, and drawings of the camps by prisoners line the museum walls. The triple-tier wooden bunk bed, where inmates were crammed into barracks and the pipes used to deliver the deadly Zyklon-B gas to the victims in the gas chambers, disguised as showers, are at the centre of the exhibit.

The exhibit was designed by the Spanish company Musealia, which had previously produced museum shows about the Titanic and the human body, which featured actual corpses.

In an interview with The CJN, the day before the exhibit opened, curators and historians Paul Salmons, and Robert Jan van Pelt, and Luis Ferreiro, director of Musealia, discussed the exhibit and how it has evolved over the years.

The idea for the show began when Ferreiro read Man’s Search for Meaning, a seminal work by psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, but whose wife and child were murdered.

“Part of what I learned from Man’s Search for Meaning is that when you do things with your heart, there’s no explanation needed, or no justification. It was born from a moral need to do something after reading that book.”

Inspired to learn more, Ferreiro, contacted Van Pelt, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo and an expert on Auschwitz, who had designed The Evidence Room at the ROM.

Ferreiro was willing to wager his family’s business on producing the exhibit, but he admits he was naïve and had much to learn.

Van Pelt sent Ferreiro, who is not Jewish, a reading list of 20 books, and told him to visit Auschwitz and Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Israel) before they began designing the current exhibit, which had its debut in Madrid in 2017. About 1.25 million people have seen the show so far, with more stops planned.

This particular exhibition is smaller than in other cities—Van Pelt laments that the ROM Crystal’s oddly-shaped walls resulted in less exhibition space—and some artifacts are not on display, including a cattle car which was used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz. The railcar has been displayed outside at other museums, but a secure spot could not be found at the Toronto museum, which is currently in the midst of a renovation.

Van Pelt says he argued for the cattle car to be placed outside but a little further away at Queen’s Park, the site of the provincial legislature. Whatever graffiti the railcar attracted, would have added to the story of the artifact, but since Musealia owned the cattle car and had paid for its restoration, it was not his decision.

The exhibit, however, has added a few pieces from survivors who came to Canada after the war, including a sculpture by Felix Kohn, which has never been displayed before, and two tiny charms crafted by Esther Friedlander, who was working in a slave labour factory and was sheltered by her friends when she was ill.

The ROM was also able to arrange for the loan of an unfinished painting from Amsterdam that had been done by Van Pelt’s great-uncle, who was killed in Auschwitz.

Each curator has an object in the collection that they find especially poignant.

Van Pelt is drawn to a tallit that belonged to Solomon Krieser, who grew up in the town of Oswiecim. It is a complicated object, since the artifact shouldn’t even be on display, he says.

Traditionally, a bar mitzvah boy receives one of these prayer shawls at age of 13 and is buried in it at his death. But in this instance, Krieser fled from Poland to France, where he and his family were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Before he was deported, he was able to smuggle the tallit to one of his daughters, who survived.

“So the fact that this very artifact exists and that we are able to show it, in some way shows the catastrophe, because it should not exist,” Van Pelt said.

British curator Paul Salmons, who has been involved with the exhibition since the start, points to an exhibit displayed for the first time in Toronto—two silver rings, each with a red heart in the centre, crafted in Auschwitz by Leon Kritzberg for himself and a woman he knew from before the war, Miriam Litman.

The pair found themselves on either side of the wire at Auschwitz and Kritzberg, a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, was able to pass goods to help Litman survive, Salmons says.

The rings are “symbolic as well as emblematic of the entire approach of exhibition, which is telling a story of mass inhumanity and destruction and dehumanization,” he says. “But throughout the exhibition we struggled also to re-humanize those people who were dehumanized, to show them as real, living people, as people who had loves and hopes and dreams and this is a form of resistance and resilience in Auschwitz that we were able to tell here for the first time.”

But even in the face of heartbreaking stories, the curators—who are immersed in Holocaust education—aim to let viewers draw their own lessons from the memory-laden artifacts.

“At no point in the exhibition do we moralize, not a single point, not even at the end, there is no point where we said, ‘Bad, bad Germans’ or ‘Never Again,’ or fight antisemitism, or any kind of direction,” says Van Pelt. “We do not give any direction for people of how to interpret the material, beyond the fact that we want them to pay attention and learn to pay attention.”

Holocaust education has been mandated for Ontario high schools since 2023, and many Grade 10 History classes are planning to visit the exhibit. There are valid reasons to study the Holocaust, but it can’t be the cure-all for antisemitism or historical amnesia, Salmons believes.

“It’s the most extensively documented, most intensively researched, best understood example of genocide in human history so far. So if you care at all about how and why mass violence happens and how societies can fall apart, it seems like it’s a good place to start,” he said.

“It seems to me that it’s perfectly reasonable that we would spend at least a few hours, a few lessons, examining that and reflecting upon it. That’s quite different though from using a difficult, traumatic emotionally challenging path to create a space where you tell young people what they should think about the world.”

Van Pelt says the curators did not approach donors and promise that they would create an exhibition that would counter Holocaust denial or diminish antisemitism. Rather, they intended to tell a compelling evidence-based story about Auschwitz.

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is that education by itself can’t prevent mass violence, Salmons points out. “We see that just over 80 years ago, a highly educated society that turned its resources against its neighbours and committed this genocide,” he said.

“If you’re serious about the cry of ‘never again’, then take it seriously and change the way you educate. It shouldn’t just be that when you arrive in a Holocaust lesson this is the first time that you talk about human rights or this is the way you stop prejudice or antisemitism. It can be a contribution, but it’s too big a burden to place on one visit to an exhibition or a few lessons in class.”

The post New exhibit about Auschwitz presents the heart-wrenching evidence of loss and destruction—and lets visitors draw their own conclusions appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.