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Wesleyan University Anti-Zionist Students Planning ‘Mass’ Regional Demonstration
Illustrative: Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators from the Midwest gather in support of Palestinians and hold a rally and march through the Loop in Chicago on Oct. 21, 2023. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Students for Justice in Palestine at Wesleyan University (WesSJP) and other allied anti-Zionist groups are planning a “Mass Action” demonstration across the entire northeast region of the US to call for alienating and destroying the State of Israel.
According to an announcement published on Tuesday in the school’s student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, the so-called Mass Action could take place at as many as 15 universities simultaneously on Feb. 24, drawing an army of students, non-students, faculty, and staff who will suspend normal business to participate in it. Wesleyan’s version of the event will take place at the Usdan University Center and the North College academic department.
“ALL [sic] students, faculty, and community members are invited to the upcoming events and rally to join and strengthen the mass movement for a liberated Palestine, and to demand of our institutions and the federal government that they immediately cease support for the Zionist state and the industries which profit from warmongering, genocide, and oppression across the globe,” wrote event organizer and Wesleyan student June Labourdette. “The rally itself will be a mass demonstration of solidarity between our community, Palestine, and the many struggles that unite organizers and workers around the world.”
She continued, “The fight for a free Palestine is an intersectional movement that encompasses fights for environmental justice, racial justice, health care and reproductive justice, and the liberation of oppressed peoples worldwide.”
Labourdette went on to describe a paranoid worldview in which Zionism is linked to “mass surveillance” which “gives our government and institutions the capability to identify members of our movement through their usual clothing or facial recognition trained on ID databases” and implored protesters who attend the event to conceal their identifies by “wearing masks and sunglasses or nondescript clothing.” At past anti-Israel protests, such instructions have facilitated hate crime assaults, property destruction, and the illegal occupation of campus buildings.
As part of the demonstration, the students will issue a slew of demands calling for policies which fulfill the requirements of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. They include terminating foreign aid to Israel, severing Wesleyan University’s relationship with the aerospace company Pratt & Whitney, and ending “all university partnerships and programs with Israeli academic institutions due to their direct contribution to the Zionist state’s goals of colonization.” According to Labourdette, these demands, and others, were authored by the group known as the February Action Committee, a splinter group of National Students for Justice for Palestine (NSJP) by way of its affiliation with Connecticut Students for Palestine.
NSJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” it said in Sept. 2024 in a now-deleted tweet. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The group’s statement followed a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, NSJP is also fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Achieving its goals has involved causing havoc on college campuses across the US and enlisting groups such as WesSJP to publicly proclaim its support for Hamas, a jihadist terrorist group which is responsible for mass murder and mass rape.
“On that day [Oct. 7, 2023], [Hamas] fighters broke through the occupation walls, initiating a new chapter in the struggle against the US-Israeli war machine, and demanding the release of thousands of Palestinians unfairly imprisoned across their historic homeland,” WesSJP said in a manifesto, published in September, which equated Israel with vermin and seemingly described WesSJP as an arm of Hamas. “Our actions are part of a strategy that strives to isolate this invasive imperial threat, and weaker it to aid in its eventual abolition. In addition to this, having undergone a major restructuring process, WesSJP looks forward to strengthening our movement capacity in collaboration with other organizations on campus, the Middletown community, and Connecticut as a whole by leaning into political education and direct action.”
In Tuesday’s announcement, Labourdette, drawing on the language of Marxism, proclaimed that the event will further anti-Zionists’ dream of a “liberated Palestine.”
“The rally itself will be a mass demonstration of solidarity between our community, Palestine, and the many struggles that unite organizers and workers around the world!” she proclaimed. “It is perhaps more important than ever to continue showing up for Palestine, showing up for each other, and carry out open, democratic mass action.”
Wesleyan University acceded to WesSJP’s demands during the campus disturbances of the 2023-2024 academic year even as advocacy groups denounced the movement of which it is a part as antisemitic.
In May, president Michael Roth agreed, at WesSJP’s behest, to create scholarships for “displaced” Palestinian students, form a working group of anti-Zionists which will “review” the possibility of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, disclose its investments in what SJP called the “military industrial complex” and Israeli companies — a provision of the deal the school has already satisfied —and consider a divestment proposal authored by another anti-Zionist group of students and faculty.
“Later this month, representatives from the pro-Palestinian protest will meet members of the Investment Committee,” Roth said in a statement announcing the concessions, which were made as part of a deal to end a protest encampment. “In the fall, the Committee for Investor Responsibility (CIR) — a standing representative body of students, faculty, alumni, and staff — will be able to propose changes to the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework for investment/divestment for consideration by the board at its fall meeting.”
Ultimately, Wesleyan rejected divestment. Its board of trustees said that “adopting a strategy that requires divesting from an ever-changing list of companies depending on changing political conditions—the proposal recommended divestment from approximately 300 companies—would be impractical and irresponsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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