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US Democrats Try to Stop Bills Designed to Punish Campus Antisemitism

US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) speaks during a House Education and The Workforce Committee hearing titled ‘Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism’ on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, Dec. 5, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

Democrats in the US House of Representatives attempted to ensure legislation which would punish universities that fail to protect Jewish students against antisemitism would die in committee and never reach the floor for a vote, according to a new report.

Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee all voted against the University Accountability Act (UAA), which would levy a tax on universities found to have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to prevent or respond to antisemitic hate incidents, Jewish Insider reported. They also voted against the Protecting American Students Act (PASA), legislation aimed at taxing the endowments of universities that admit more foreign students than American ones. It was prompted by reports that foreign students overwhelmingly contribute to antisemitism on college campuses.

“Universities — many of whom have ever growing foreign student populations and receive massive amounts of foreign funding — focus more on appeasing those with antisemitic views on their campuses than protecting all students, upholding their institutional values and holding those accountable who violate such policies and values,” Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) said, commenting on the bill’s necessity.

Both bills were introduced by Republican lawmakers — including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), and Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-GA). Democrats denounced them as inane and potentially injurious to higher education, according to Jewish Insider (JI).

“This bill fails to address the issue head-on and focuses on punishing schools instead of working to improve them,” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) said, as quoted by JI, railing against the UAA. “I’m concerned about this bill’s unintended consequence: the very real potential for creating a vicious cycle of aggressive and tendentious claims against universities.”

Malliotakis has said, however, that the UAA stands to prevent antisemitism and protect American taxpayers from funding colleges that refuse to address it.

“If these schools are receiving generous tax benefits from the federal government at the expense of American taxpayers, they should be doing more than simply giving a slap on the write to perpetrators of hate,” the congresswoman, alluding to the many times when students who committed antisemitic hate incidents eluded punishment, said earlier this month in a statement announcing the bill. “Our legislation seeks to hold these institutions accountable with lofty financial punishments that would encourage them to investigate and crack down on instances of antisemitism and help foster a safer academic environment for all students, regardless of their gender, race, or religion.”

The debate over the bill comes as many Democrats have hesitated or refused to acknowledge the antisemitic component of the anti-Zionist movement on the left, which opposes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Meanwhile, higher education experts and Jewish leaders have pointed to anti-Zionist activists’ own behavior and public remarks as evidence of anti-Jewish animus.

In April it was revealed that a principal organizer of pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia University, Khymani James, filmed himself proclaiming that Zionists, a category that includes a vast majority of Jews around the world, should be murdered and that they are fortunate that he has not begun killing them himself.

In September, one day before a high profile anti-Zionist event took place at the University of Pennsylvania, an unidentified male walked into the university’s Hillel building behind a staffer and shouted “F—k the Jews” and “Jesus Christ is king!” before overturning tables, podium stands, and chairs, according to students and school officials who spoke with The Algemeiner. Days earlier, just before the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah, a swastika was graffitied in the basement of the university’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

In February, at the University of California, an anti-Zionist demonstrator spat on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively. That incident was concurrent with an anti-Zionist mob’s descending on an event organized by the school’s Jewish community speakers, which forced the mostly Jewish audience to flee to a secret safe room.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a life-long progressive and steadfast supporter of Israel, has noted on social media numerous times that left-wing and right-wing anti-Zionists promote similar antisemitic tropes. Last month, he criticized blogger Briahna Joy Gray, who previously served as press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, for tweeting that Israel trains dogs to “rape Palestinian prisoners,” an accusation which bears little to no difference from the antisemitic conspiracies promoted daily by neo-Nazi websites such as “The Daily Stormer.” Days earlier, he lambasted Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who supports marrying teenage girls to older men, for trafficking in false claims of a “genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza, a falsehood that has been uttered many times by Democratic lawmakers such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

“Nick Fuentes is a racist and an antisemite, a white nationalist and a white supremacist to the core,” Torres tweeted. “When a liar tells you that there is a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, see it for what it is: a lie.”

The hateful and paranoiac quality of anti-Zionist activists’ rhetoric is reflected in the conduct of pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses, Asaf Romirowsky — an expert on the Middle East and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East — told The Algemeiner in May, explaining that the country is witnessing a synthesis of Marxism and fascism which cannot tolerate a liberal-democratic state in which Jews have an active role in public life nor the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

“The protests are not about free speech. They are about supporting terrorism, about calling for a genocide of Jews,” he said. “They are violent, verbally and physically. People are ending up in the hospital with injuries. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, and that should be a wake-up call to the American people.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post US Democrats Try to Stop Bills Designed to Punish Campus Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.

Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.

Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.

Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders. 

The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work. 

“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.

Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.

In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 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 conflict. 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 has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.

US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.

The post ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer

Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.

As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.

Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.

Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.

The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”

Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.

The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.

Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.

Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.

In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.

Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.

Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.

With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”

Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll

Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.

Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.

The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.

Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats. 

Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.

In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.

Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017. 

Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it. 

The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.

The post US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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