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US House Committee Announces Investigation Into Antisemitism at Rutgers University
The Endowment Justice Collective, a coalition of organizations at Rutgers University, held a “die in,” Piscataway, New Jersey, March 19, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Rutgers University in New Jersey has been named as the latest school being investigated by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce for allegedly ignoring antisemitism for years and allowing an open season on hate toward Jewish students.
“Rutgers stands out for the intensity and pervasiveness of antisemitism on its campuses,” Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) wrote to high-level university officials on Wednesday. “Rutgers senior administrators, faculty, staff, academic departments and centers, and student organizations have contributed to the development of a pervasive climate of antisemitism.”
With the announcement, Rutgers University joined a slew of colleges and universities accused of disregarding complaints of bullying, discrimination, and harassment reported by Jewish students. Foxx, as well as other lawmakers, have scrutinized this alleged pattern of behavior, which persists despite the fact that virtually all higher education institutions in the US impose robust anti-discrimination policies aimed at protecting minority groups from bigotry. Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley are among the other schools currently being investigated by the committee.
In Wednesday’s letter, Foxx recounted numerous incidents as cause for a thorough examination of Rutgers University’s handling of antisemitism, zeroing in on the conduct of its officials employed by the Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR). Foxx noted that after Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughtering of Israeli civilians, CSRR rationalized the terrorist group’s violence, saying in a public statement that it was the result of “decades of oppression and attempted erasure.”
CSRR also recruits figures accused of antisemitism, Foxx noted. Lara Sheehi, a former George Washington University professor who has been accused of abusing Jewish students and filing phony disciplinary charges against them, is listed as one of its affiliates, and just three days after Oct. 7, CSRR hosted an event featuring Sheehi in which she defended Hamas’ actions as a legitimate response to “Zionist settler colonialism,” which she called “the provocation.”
CSRR’s extremism has infected the student body, according to Foxx. Last month, during an event titled “Gaza, Genocide, and International Law,” anti-Zionist students heckled an Israeli professor and later accused him of stoking “hatred” and endangering their safety. One of them expressed her desire to pelt his “shiny pink head” with a bottled water.
The congressional letter detailed how other academic departments have exuded similar anti-Jewish attitudes. Last month, the program coordinator of the university’s Center for Latino Arts and Culture, Silismar Suriel, “refused to advertise” an event because it was co-organized by Rutgers Hillel. Foxx noted that Suriel was on record saying, “We are a f—king university serving capitalist issues, serving Zionists … do the Zionists own the university?” and “f—k you colonizer … f—k you, Zionist, why don’t you go and read a f—king book?”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has been a wellspring of antisemitic rhetoric at Rutgers. The group was one of dozens of SJP chapters that cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, an attack that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and numerous rapes of Israeli women. As video footage of the terrorist group’s atrocities circled the web, Rutgers SJP shared on its Instagram pages memes that said “Glory to resistance” and “the clock started running when the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled from their land by Zionists during the Nakba.” It added, “You are watching an occupied people rise up against an apartheid nuclear power that has been occupying them and making their life unlivable since 1948.”
A milieu of extreme anti-Zionism at the school has resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since Oct. 7. In November, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”
Similar incidents at Rutgers are not new. In the past few years, the school’s AEPi house has been vandalized three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a SJP rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.
Foxx has requested from Rutgers “all reports of antisemitic acts or incidents” and “related documents” going back to 2021 that were made to the offices of the president, general counsel, dean of students, police department, human resources, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, among others. She also requested documentation on the school’s funding of Rutgers Students for Justice in Palestine and disciplinary measures taken against students who have been found guilty of antisemitic abuse.
“Congress’ oversight powers are derived from the US Constitution and have been repeatedly affirmed by the United States Supreme Court,” Foxx concluded, explaining the university’s legal obligation to provide the documents she requested. “I expect that this request will be conveyed promptly to all parities who would be reasonably expected to have responsive materials.”
The Algemeiner has reached out to Rutgers University for comment for this story.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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