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University of Michigan Faculty Form Anti-Zionist Group, Accuse School of Aiding ‘Genocide of Palestinian People’
Pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan. Photo: Screenshot
A group of professors and other workers at the University of Michigan has formed a “Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine” (FSJP) chapter and as its first act published a guest column in The Michigan Daily accusing the school of “horrific suppression” of anti-Zionist viewpoints and “brutal actions against students.”
Claiming to be “engaged in education, advocacy, and action in solidarity with Palestinian liberation,” the group, which is a companion to the extreme anti-Zionist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), railed against University of Michigan president Santa Ono for taking steps to cool the campus climate and discourage rhetoric that denigrates those who have staked out positions on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
One action the group singled out for opprobrium was the university’s decision in November to cancel a campus-wide vote on an anti-Israel resolution accusing the Jewish state of “genocide” and “apartheid.” Another vote on a resolution condemning Hamas as well as bigotry targeting both Jews and Muslims was also canceled. In a statement issued on Dec. 5, Ono defended the decision, saying both measures “have done more to stoke fear, anger, and animosity on our campus than they would ever accomplish” if adopted as policy.
FSJP called his plea for civility hypocritical.
Regarding its claims of “brutal actions against students,” FSJP cited to two incidents in which a crush of anti-Zionist protesters stormed administrative buildings while screaming “ceasefire now,” a call for Israel to halt its military operations aimed at eradicating the Hamas terror group from Gaza. In one of the demonstrations, held on Nov. 22, the protesters attempted to force their way into Ono’s office in the Alexander G. Ruthven administrative building, pushing past Division of Public Safety and Security (DPPS) officers while clamoring to see the president.
An altercation caught on video ensued between the demonstrators and the police, and a female Muslim student was arrested. The faculty group as well as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) claimed that footage of the arrest showed an officer ripping off the student’s hijab while attempting to handcuff her. The Algemeiner has viewed the footage, however, and cannot substantiate the allegation.
In total, police arrested 40 students from the building that day. A similar incident occurred four days earlier, when the protesters clashed with police after successfully taking over the Ruthven building.
“Forty students were arrested and cited for trespassing because they dared to request a meeting with their president,” FSJP wrote. “All of this, in a campus community that waxes poetic about its efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and its exceptional status as ‘leaders and best.’”
The campus employees added that they believed the University of Michigan has tried to “bury the university’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people” and demanded that the school divest any of its holdings in companies linked to Israel. “A genocide carried out by the Israeli government and facilitated by corporations in which the university invests,” they continued.
The University of Michigan has long been a hub of anti-Israel activity. In January, anti-Israel student protesters there chanted, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide,” during US Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to campus, where she was scheduled to discuss climate change. They also chanted, “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution” while waving Palestinian flags. A student who appeared to be leading the demonstration condemned the Biden administration for approving aid to Israel, which she referred to as “the Zionist entity.”
FSJP is a new effort organized and supported by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a nonprofit organization that lobbies universities to adopt an academic boycott of Israel. The group advocates policies stipulating that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end” and delineates specific restrictions that adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students who seek to study in Israel.
On its website, USACBI says professors should form such chapters “in response to the genocidal assault on Gaza and the crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices” and asks that “founding members make a commitment” to supporting academic boycotts of Israel.
The movement to form new “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” groups is growing. So far, chapters have cropped up all over higher education since Oct. 7, including at New York University, the Claremont Colleges, the University of California system, University of Florida, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Rutgers University, Haverford College, Princeton University, and Harvard University.
Critics argue the movement’s growth poses a threat to the well being of Jewish college students. According to a recent study conducted by the AMCHA Initiative, an antisemitism watchdog, a positive correlation exists between college faculty who support boycotts of Israel and the occurrence of antisemitic incidents on college campuses.
AMCHA researchers found that the “presence and number of faculty” who supported academic boycotts before Israel’s last war with Hamas in 2021, which began after the terrorist organization fired more than 150 rockets at Israeli territory, “were strongly and reliably associated with every measure of faculty and student-perpetrated antisemitic activity during this period.” They also found through a series of regression analyses that schools with “five or more faculty who had expressed support for academic BDS [the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel] prior to May 2021” were 5.6 times “more likely to have a student government that issued an anti-Zionist statement,” and 3.6 times more likely to have incidents of antisemitic harassment and intimidation.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the director of the AMCHA Initiative, reiterated that point on Thursday.
“AMCHA’s research has shown consistently that promoting BDS in the classroom is highly correlated with increased antisemitism in the campus square,” Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner. “So if the University of Michigan really wants to address the problem of antisemitism, it must start with ensuring that its faculty are prohibited from using their academic positions as bully pulpits for spewing hatred of the Jewish state and its supporters and encouraging activism to harm them.”
“Not only are FJP groups charged with giving support and academic legitimacy to the BDS efforts of their campus SJP groups, they are also committing their members to bringing academic BDS and its goals of delegitimizing and dismantling the Jewish state into their classrooms and conference halls,” she added.
Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), a nonprofit that promotes academic freedom in higher education, told The Algemeiner that while faculty should form groups centered on common interests, doing so for the purpose of denigrating others is grossly inappropriate.
“Unfortunately, based on its first public statement, the Michigan FJP appears bent on uplifting the Palestinian cause while demeaning and denigrating Jews on campus,” Elman explained. “It’s astonishing that in its lengthy initial public statement the group could find no space to advocate for the 100 plus hostages including US citizens and young women, who continue to be held in captivity by Hamas.”
“What’s most concerning about these new Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups is that they’ll end up giving a faculty ‘pass’ for the bad behavior and hostile and bigoted rhetoric that we’ve seen from all too many Students for Justice in Palestine and affiliated clubs in recent weeks,” she added. “Students tend to take their cues from faculty. On campuses where these groups are forming, I wont be surprised to see an uptick in student peer-on-peer harassment, anti-Israel activity, and antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of Michigan Faculty Form Anti-Zionist Group, Accuse School of Aiding ‘Genocide of Palestinian People’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows
Pro-Hamas protesters led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) demonstrate outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 14, 2024. Photo: Derek French via Reuters Connect
A new poll released on Wednesday underscores how far removed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other anti-Zionist organizations that claim to represent Jews are from mainstream Jewish views on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Commissioned by The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit founded by a researcher whose aim is to monitor and accurately report Jewish opinion on the most consequential issues affecting the community, the poll found that the vast majority of American Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements and anti-Israel university protests are antisemitic.
The findings also showed that Jews across the US overwhelmingly oppose the views and tactics of JVP, a prominent anti-Israel group which has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley, JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” It was infamously one of the first organizations to blame Israel following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and the United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said as Israelis were still counting their dead and missing.
American Jews who responded to The Jewish Majority’s poll overwhelmingly reject this line of thinking. Seventy percent said they believe that anti-Zionism of any stripe is antisemitic; 85 percent believe that Hamas, whom JVP described as “the oppressed,” is a genocidal group; and 79 percent support vocally pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization JVP has defamed as “not a credible source on antisemitism and racism.”
Additionally, JVP’s methods of protest are unpopular among American Jews, The Jewish Majority added, noting that 75 percent disapprove of “blocking traffic” and only 18 percent approve of protesters’ wearing masks to conceal their identities. Sixty percent also disagree with staging protests outside the homes of public officials, a common JVP tactic.
“Plain and simple, Jewish Voice for Peace is an extremist group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Jonathan Schulman, The Jewish Majority’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “American Jews share a strong and consistent stance against anti-Zionists as well as a deep concern over rising antisemitism and the tactics used by organizations like JVP.”
He continued, “It is high time people see through the charade: JVP is not representative of anyone but a marginal fringe, even if a few radical Jews are involved in their movement.”
The Jewish Majority’s poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s inner workings, messaging, and political activities were recently documented in a groundbreaking report on the group published last month by StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group based in Los Angeles, California.
Titled, “A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace,” the report noted that JVP has promoted a distorted history of Zionism and Israel, accusing the movement for Jewish self-determination of everything from training US police officers to violate the rights of African Americans to abusing “Jewish history.” In doing so, it has allied with extremist groups such as WithinOurLifetime — whose founder has threatened to set Jews on fire and led a movement to harass Jews on New York City’s public transportation — and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and has proclaimed that “the Zionist entity has no right to exist.”
The report also stated that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
JVP has also compared Zionism to Nazism.
“This is Holocaust inversion — an antisemitic tactic in which the genocide Jews faced in the past is used to promote baseless hatred against Jews today,” the StandWithUs report said. “The only group benefiting from JVP’s Holocaust inversion is Hamas — a truly genocidal terrorist group. JVP has helped shield them from accountability for launching the war, ruthlessly militarizing civilian areas across Gaza, stealing humanitarian aid, and rejecting nearly every proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal.”
In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of JVP of transgressing federal election law by misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The complaint lodged a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose. From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint. The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.
JVP continues to have the support of powerful friends in the world of progressive philanthropy, a formidable subset of the American elite, amid these scandals and controversies.
Since 2017 it has — according to a 2023 report by the National Association of Scholars — received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, including the Open Society Policy Center — founded by billionaire George Soros — the Kaphan Foundation, and others.
According to the recent StandWithUs report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday demanded Israel pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza” and urged the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state.
During a press conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in West Java, as part of his Asian tour to Malaysia and Pakistan, Erdogan rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Erdogan also advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The creation of a sovereign, territorially united State of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital cannot be delayed any further,” he said during the press conference, as aired by the Turkish TRT Haber TV channel.
“Any step, proposal, or project that undermines this matter is illegitimate in our view, and it means more conflicts, bloodshed, and instability,” he continued.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
“Until there is peace in Gaza, until the Palestinians achieve peace, peace in the region is impossible,” the Turkish president said.
With talks underway to extend the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Erdogan also demanded that Israel must pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza.”
“The cost of Israel’s 15-month attacks in Gaza is about $100 billion,” he said. “The law dictates that the perpetrator must compensate for the damage.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorism-related offenses.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages have been released during the first phase, which is set to last six weeks.
During the press conference, Erdogan also announced that Turkey and Indonesia will join forces in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Last month, Erdogan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara.
Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel during the Gaza war, even threatening to invade the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if it cannot stop Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.
Last year, Ankara also ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly compared Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.
The post Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel
College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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