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University of Michigan Reportedly Moving to Suspend Pro-Hamas Group for Up to Four Years

Pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan. Photo: Screenshot

The University of Michigan has reportedly initiated disciplinary proceedings against one of its most outspoken and controversial anti-Israel groups, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the result of which may be a suspension of up to four years.

“The complaint was initiated through the Office of Student Organization Advancement and Recognition (SOAR), which is under the Center for Campus Involvement,” SAFE said on Thursday in a statement, which did not disclose what merited the punishment, published on Instagram. “Similarly to the academic disciplinary charges initiated through [the Office of Student Conflict Resolution] against protesters from the November 17th sit-in, the university acts as the judge, jury, and executioner in these disciplinary proceedings.”

It added, “This unprecedented, racist move against a legacy org contradicts any claim that the university values its history of student activism.”

The University of Michigan has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.

SAFE has long been a source of anti-Israel activity on campus. In January, its members led an anti-government protest against the outgoing presidential administration, represented by US Vice President Kamala Harris, who appeared at the school to discuss climate change. They chanted “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide” and called for mass casualty events inspired by Islamist terrorism, screaming “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution” while waving Palestinian flags. The 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.”

In 2022, during observance of the Jewish New Year, SAFE erected an “apartheid wall” on campus and led an anti-Israel protest in front of it. Some University of Michigan students approached the protesters and urged them to become fully apprised of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Michigan Daily, a campus newspaper, reported at the time. Standing atop a nearby structure, they made a “thumbs-down” gesture when they perceived the protesters’ remarks as offensive or lacking nuance.

By sanctioning SAFE, the University of Michigan joins other schools that have taken similar steps to deter and punish extremism and lawlessness on campus. Earlier this month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reportedly banished from campus a student who penned an article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.

Other schools, however, have come under fire for what critics have described as insufficient action to identify and discipline vandals and those who have even perpetrated antisemitic assault and continue to threaten the safety of Jewish students. Harvard University, for example, has not announced any progress on its investigation of the vandalizing of the John Harvard Statue and University Hall. Meanwhile, Princeton University has not been successful in determining who graffitied school property last month on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

Just recently, two Jewish students at DePaul University in Chicago were “brutally” assaulted while participating in a pro-Israel demonstration. Their attackers remain at large.

Jewish civil rights organizations have repeatedly called on university leaders to address extremist pro-Hamas activity on their campuses, citing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena last year. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers during the 2023-2024 academic year, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents, 52 and 38 respectively. Harvard University, the University of California—Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, the ADL report continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where an anti-Zionist activist punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.

“Jews and/or Zionists were associated with greed and bloodthirstiness or compared to rodents and other animals,” the report said. “In one incident on April 19, 2024, at the encampment at Yale University, a protester displayed a sign depicting a shirtless Joe Biden cradling and breastfeeding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is drinking drops of blood from dollar signs on Biden’s bosom.”

Another recent study measured the degree to which college faculty foster anti-Jewish hatred and spread propaganda undermining the legitimacy of Israel’s existence by founding pro-Hamas Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters. Authored by researchers of AMCHA Initiative, a higher education antisemitism watchdog, the study found that FJP’s presence on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.

FJP also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. The report said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Professors at FJP schools also spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools.

“These faculty led-groups are inciting anti-Zionist activism among students, propelling academic boycotts, and actively fostering an environment where Jewish students are physically attacked and threatened,” AMCHA executive director and co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said in a press release announcing the study’s publication. “Without immediate intervention from university administrations and policymakers, the situation will only worsen, leaving Jewish students and faculty vulnerable to escalating violence.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post University of Michigan Reportedly Moving to Suspend Pro-Hamas Group for Up to Four Years first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

i24 NewsFinance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”

Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”

The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.

“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”

The post Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30

A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

i24 NewsThe Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.

During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.

The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”

Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.

“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”

The post Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS

i24 NewsOver 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.

Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.

The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.

The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.

The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.

The post Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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