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‘They Can Never Defeat Us’: Jewish Students Commemorate Oct. 7 Victims at George Washington University
George Washington University senior and Chabad GW president Sabrina Soffer delivering a speech at “Remember, Resolve, Rededicate,” a commemoration of the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre, on Oct. 5, 2024. Photo: GW Chabad
Jewish students at George Washington University in Washington, DC came together on Saturday to commemorate the lives of the kidnapped and deceased ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, a tragedy which claimed more Jewish lives in one day than any since the Holocaust.
Organized by Chabad GW, the event — titled “Remember, Resolve, Rededicate” — was held at Kogan Plaza, a section of campus that has seen both memorials to the victims of Hamas’s barbarism and celebrations of their afflictions led by pro-Hamas activists. On Saturday, however, a generation of Jewish students whose lives and conceptions of self have been upended by the events of the past year claimed the space as exclusively theirs, transforming it into a realm of healing and perseverance.
Speaking to The Algemeiner on Monday, several students who attended the gather remarked on the swiftness of the passage of time and why, one year removed from Oct. 7, it still feels like only the day after.
“It still feels like Oct. 8, because we’re still missing our loves ones,” GW Chabad president Sabrina Soffer said during an interview on Monday. “Israel is such a small country, and there, everyone is like family. We’re still missing over 100 people; we’ve lost so many, people are displaced from their homes — and the war is still ongoing and only escalating from here. I just hope that Israel will achieve victory. I want the war to end, but Israel must win.”
The presence at the vigil of those seemingly hostile to those gathered in support of Israel and the Jewish community also shrunk the distance between one year ago and now. At one point, a young woman wearing a keffiyeh roamed through the crowd, taking pictures of the students as they listened to speeches and comforted one another. She did not disclose what the pictures were for nor which media outlet she represented.
“It was an amazing visualization, the more I think about it,” freshman Nate Neutstadt told The Algemeiner. We’re here together as a community celebrating life, celebrating love, and on the other hand, there were people coming up to us trying to fuel the fire and spread hate.”
A native of San Diego, California, Neutstadt chose to attend GW — which he described as his “dream school” for its highly reputed school of international affairs — fully aware that every day on campus would see his Jewish identity scrutinized and maligned. Resisting any notion that Jewish identity can be driven underground, he accepted the challenge. The unknown woman was one of many obstacles against which he, as well as other first-year Jewish students, had steeled themselves long ago. Soon, she became an afterthought. No one photographed her in return.
“We were all just here in the moment, celebrating. And I think all of our mindsets at this point is that they’re going to do what they’re going to do and we’re going to be here celebrating life and love,” he added, explaining that he intends to fight hatred with Jewish pride. “There’s so much hate going around towards Jews just over our existing, and I think the best way to fight against it is to be a proud Jew, to live Jewish life in the face of hate. Because no matter what these antisemites try to do, chanting in the streets ‘intifada, intifada,’ they can never defeat us.”
Others, such as senior Ari Shapiro, have experienced an awakening of Jewish identity in the post-Oct 7. world. Throughout most of his life, Shapiro explained, Jewishness was an overlooked component of his identity, a detail of his biography which entitled him to a bar mitzvah but was attenuated by the comfort and banality of suburbia.
“I’m in a different boat than some of the others Jewish students you’ll talk to,” he said. “Before Oct. 7, 2023, I had never really considered what it meant to be Jewish. I never really felt an attachment to the identity or had even considered it to be a barrier between me and anyone else who wasn’t Jewish. That’s ironic, I know, given my name, which doesn’t get more Jewish than that. But seeing how Hamas butchered and slaughtered thousands of people, many of whom were part of the kibbutzim, which is usually the farther left group in Israel; and then seeing people on this campus demonstrate in support of their killers — that forced me to realize that no matter how much I made being Jewish as part of my identity, I would still share in the fate of others whose Judaism and Jewishness is the basis of how they are perceived by the world.”
For Natasha Halbfinger, who lived in Israel for four years during adolescence, Oct. 7 affirmed values in which she has always believed.
“We, as the Jewish people, will continue to be proud of our identities,” she proclaimed during a speech delivered on Saturday night. “We will not be Jews with trembling knees. We will continue to turn horror into beautiful celebrations of life — because Am Israel Chai.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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French Prosecutors Seek Trial of 6 for Deadly 1982 Terror Attack on Jewish Restaurant
The site of the 1982 attack in the Jewish Quarter of Paris. Photo: David Monniaux via Wikimedia Commons.
French authorities have requested that six suspects be tried before a special terrorism court for their alleged involvement in a deadly terrorist attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris 43 years ago that left six dead and at least 20 injured.
In a statement on Wednesday, France’s National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) announced it is requesting the trial of Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, suspected of being one of the gunmen behind the attack, along with five other suspects, nearly four decades after the deadly incident.
The attack, the deadliest antisemitic incident in France since World War II, took place at a Jewish restaurant in Paris’ Jewish quarter, where two separate groups of men launched a coordinated assault using grenades followed by machine guns against customers and staff.
According to French media reports at the time, the attackers were believed to be members of the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (Fatah-RC), a radical Palestinian group based in Iraq and led by Abu Nidal.
Abu Zayed, a former member of the terror group, also known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), is suspected of being one of the attackers behind the mass murder at Chez Jo Goldenberg in Paris on August 9, 1982.
In 2015, French intelligence revealed that he had been living in Norway since the 1990s, sparking a lengthy extradition process met with strong resistance from Norwegian authorities.
In late 2020, Abu Zayed was charged with murder and attempted murder in a Paris court for his role in the 1982 attack on the kosher restaurant.
Now, French authorities have also issued arrest warrants for five other suspects, seeking to try them for complicity in murder and attempted murder linked to a terrorist organization. It remains unclear whether any of the five suspects are currently in France.
According to Radio France Internationale, it is widely believed that Abu Zayed was able to evade authorities for years because of a secret agreement between the French government and the Palestinian terrorist organization. The deal reportedly allowed members of the terror group to avoid prosecution as long as they refrained from carrying out further attacks in France.
This arrangement closely mirrors a deal between Germany and Palestinian terror groups after the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972. That agreement was a major factor prompting Israel to launch a retaliatory campaign to track down and kill the terrorists responsible for the attack.
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Top Teachers Union Votes to End Alliance with ADL Over Israel Support
NEA Headquarters in Washington, DC. //WikiCommons
On Sunday, the National Education Association (NEA) voted to cease its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), citing the latter’s defense of the Jewish state.
The policymaking, 7,000-member assembly of the nation’s largest teachers’ union approved “new business item 39,” a measure that resolved: “NEA will not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or its statistics. NEA will not participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.”
In response to the decision, the ADL called it “profoundly disturbing, that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students.”
The ADL declared: “We will not be cowed for supporting Israel, and we will not be deterred from our work reaching millions of students with educational programs every year.”
Cautioning that “there’s an internal NEA process that deals with issues like this, and it is far from a completed process,” the ADL vowed: “We will continue to call out this antisemitism and prioritize our Jewish students and educators.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a consistent and influential critic of Israel’s right to exist, praised the teachers union’s rejection of the ADL.
“We welcome the NEA’s vote to stop exposing public school students to biased materials provided by the Anti-Defamation League due to its long history of spreading anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” CAIR said in a statement.
“The ADL has only become worse under its increasingly unhinged director Jonathan Greenblatt, who has repeatedly smeared and endangered students in recent years,” the group said. “This principled move is a significant step toward fostering respect for the rights and dignity of all students in public schools, who must receive an education without facing biased, politically-driven agendas.”
In a post Wednesday on X, ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote: “The answer to the surge in antisemitism in our classrooms isn’t to exclude the Jewish community from the conversation. Anti-Israel activists within @NEAToday cannot poison U.S. classrooms with politics. @ADL‘s priority is, and has been, to support Jewish students and educators. Our nation’s school systems should have access to the best resources for education on the Holocaust and antisemitism.”
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‘Transparently Antisemitic’: Google Founder Sergey Brin Blasts UN in Internal Company Forum
Sergey Brin of Google
(Source: ReutersConnect)
Google cofounder Sergey Brin criticized the United Nations in a company forum, calling it “transparently antisemitic” after the release of a report that accused Google and other tech firms of enabling Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Brin was responding to a UN report that claimed companies including Alphabet, Google’s parent company, profited from what it called “the genocide carried out by Israel” by providing cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government and military.
“Throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides,” Brin wrote in a discussion thread on a Google DeepMind employee forum. “I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the U.N.”
The report was the brainchild of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. The Trump administration has accused her of antisemitism and has called for her removal, saying she has demonstrated consistent antisemitic biases in her work and has unfairly singled out Israel.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the US was imposing sanctions on Albanese under a February executive order targeting those who “prompt International Criminal Court (ICC) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.”
In a post on X, Rubio accused Albanese of waging “political and economic warfare” against both nations and asserted that “such efforts will no longer be tolerated.”
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on “human rights violations” that Israel allegedly commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and rationalize Hamas attacks on the Jewish state. In the months following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 atrocities across southern Israel, Albanese accused the Jewish state of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.
Google has faced internal uproar over the company’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus deal with Israel. The deal has faced sustained criticism from human rights activists and some Google employees, who argue the technology could be used to enhance Israeli military operations and surveillance of Palestinians. According to a recent UN report, the agreement provided Israel with key cloud and AI infrastructure after Hamas launched its deadly October 7, 2023 attack against the Jewsih state, killing approximately 1,200 people and prompting a large-scale Israeli military response in Gaza.
Google has previously punished employees who protested the company’s relationship with Israel. After a wave of internal demonstrations in 2024, CEO Sundar Pichai issued a companywide memo urging staff not to use the workplace to debate political issues.
In the months following Oct. 7, Israeli defensive military operations in Gaza have led to the deaths of more than 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Hamas, the terrorist group that runs the Gaza Health Ministry, has repeatedly fabricated casualty statistics in the past.
The UN report accused US tech firms of exploiting a lucrative opportunity created by the conflict and Israel’s need for digital tools. It singled out Google and Amazon as being complicit in Israel’s so called “genocide” in Gaza.
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