RSS
What Is Next for Ukraine and Russia?
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy listens during a bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City, New York, US, September 25, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.
There are two weeks to go before Donald Trump, elected to a second term on November 5, 2024, returns to the White House, but the outlines of the first “100 days” of his policy, albeit at the declarative level, are already quite clear. In addition to mass deportation of illegal immigrants, abolishing the education policy of the outgoing administration, “streamlining” the executive branch by cutting thousands of federal government positions, and other ambitious measures, there are also steps to implement one of the main campaign promises. Namely, to end as quickly as possible the “hot phase” of regional armed conflicts that could trigger political and economic instability in the world at large.
Trump’s promise to bring the war in Ukraine to an end through diplomatic measures is not the lowest on this list. Although the campaign promise to bring Putin and Zelensky to the negotiating table and end the conflict within 24 hours has already disappeared from the Trump team’s rhetoric, they remain confident that after January 20, 2024, the White House and the US State Department will have enough political and material resources to bring the hostilities to a relatively quick halt. And to convince Ukrainian and Russian leaders to accept Washington’s proposed roadmap, if not for a peaceful settlement, then for a long-term ceasefire (i.e., freezing the conflict). Donald Trump reaffirmed his commitment to an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war during his December 7 meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Possible offer for Russia
According to observers, the compromise arrangements that Trump intends to offer to both sides do not satisfy either Kyiv or Moscow so far. Thus, Putin, although showing glimmers of interest in ending the conflict, continues to insist that peace is possible only if, as a result of the negotiations, Kyiv officially refuses to join NATO and if Ukraine and the West agree to Russia’s annexation of five Ukrainian regions. Specifically, Crimea, officially annexed back in 2014, and four regions – Donetsk, Luhansk (the former self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”), Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. Moreover, Moscow wants to receive these regions in their entirety within their administrative boundaries, not only those parts that are already occupied by Russian troops.
Although according to Reuters sources in Moscow, “Russia may also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small patches of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in the north and south of Ukraine.” Basically, Putin is in no hurry. Western sanctions against the Russian economy have not yet had the expected effect, internal opposition to the regime is weak, and Russian troops continue to push through the AFU defenses in the east of the country, albeit slowly. And to him, observers believe, dragging out does make sense in order to gain more by pursuing further land grabs. Finally, the level of public support for the SMO (“Special Military Operation,” as Russia officially calls the war with Ukraine) is still quite high. For example, at the end of November, according to the Moscow-based sociological Levada Center, the level of this support was 77% — despite the fact that a third of respondents confirmed that the country was still experiencing difficulties related to the SMO, and about 40% believed that real difficulties lay ahead. This may be why, judging by the same survey, support for the idea of peace talks in November 2024 stood at 57%, while support for continued military action fell to 35%. However, these figures hardly mean anything more than passive readiness of Russians to agree with any decision of the country’s leadership — to continue or end the SMO, but the latter, most likely, on the terms officially announced by the authorities.
Trump’s team seems to recognize this reality, which probably explains why the three options for a plan to end the war offered by his team to Putin, according to media reports, appear to contain more “carrots” than “sticks” for Russia. According to the first option, which was presented by Trump’s incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg together with former National Security Council official Fred Fleitz, as an analytical report by The America First Policy Institute, a think tank close to Trump, calls for freezing the current battle lines.
The second and third scenarios, presented respectively by Vice President-elect JD Vance, and by Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting intelligence chief and ambassador to Germany, are essentially very close to the Kellogg/Fleitz ideas, except for some technical additions of varying degrees of importance. The Vance project also envisages the creation of a demilitarized zone at the existing front lines that would be “heavily fortified” to prevent further Russian incursions. The Grenell plan suggests the creation of “autonomous zones” in eastern Ukraine, without much detail as to what exactly is meant. (Purely theoretically, one can assume that it could be a territorial autonomy within Ukraine with expanded sovereignty; a quasi-state like the “Palestinian autonomy” under a de facto Russian protectorate, or a Russian-Ukrainian condominium with the participation of some external forces; or some third option).
The stick in all these scenarios is a threat to Moscow to dramatically increase military and other aid to Kyiv should it refuse to accept US proposals.
Incentives and warnings for Ukraine
In fact, this is what the outgoing administration of Joe Biden intends to do: according to media reports, it has developed a “last-minute” program that provides for an “avalanche” of military aid. In any case, this is what Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak. He said that by mid-January 2025, the USA intends to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery shells and a large number of missiles and armored vehicles, as well as to train new Ukrainian troops at sites outside Ukrainian territory.
And all of this comes in a package with a promise to transfer roughly $9 billion in military aid to Kyiv through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and defense packages under the president’s authority. As well as a new set of sanctions against Russia, which, according to the same reports, are called to complicate “Russia’s ability to sustain its war effort and boosting Ukraine’s bargaining power at the negotiation table that could lay the groundwork for a future settlement.” However, there are doubts in American media and political circles that the outgoing administration has enough time to utilize these resources. Just as it is clear that all this large-scale and, from the point of view of many in Ukraine, very late influx of weapons cannot be carried out in a matter of weeks, so it will have to be implemented — or abandoned — mostly by the new administration.
This scenario may be convenient for Trump’s team as a “stick” for Moscow. However, judging by what is being reported from the president-elect’s inner circle, so far they would prefer, in response to Kremlin, to start with incentives rather than intimidation. It is indicative, for example, that all three scenarios of completing the war in Ukraine that were produced by Trump’s inner circle, denied the NATO membership for Ukraine in the foreseeable future. The difference is that while in the plans of Vance and Kellogg/Fleitz this looks like an inevitable concession to Putin in exchange for his agreement to end or freeze the conflict on terms more or less satisfactory to all parties involved, the plan of Grenell, who was one of the few people at a September meeting in New York between Trump and Zelensky, presents Ukraine’s non-participation in NATO as a conceptual judgment (“NATO membership for Ukraine was not in America’s interest”).
Yet, this is precisely what Kyiv is not ready to accept by definition. Ukraine’s joining, or initiating the process of joining NATO, was a critical element of the “Victory Plan” presented by Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2024, amid a perceived decline in Western interest in Ukraine and accumulated war fatigue in Eastern Europe. Key points of the plan included recognizing Ukraine’s absolute right to be a member of any alliance, regardless of the opinion of “third countries” on the matter; large-scale investments in military production facilities in Ukraine; auditing and expanding anti-Russian sanctions; and diplomatic pressure on Moscow.
This plan, presented in the Verkhovna Rada and at various high-profile international events, as well as Zelensky’s earlier proposed “peace formula,” did not evoke much enthusiasm among Ukraine’s allies. Therefore, at this stage Kyiv is ready for a minimal alternative — to be “invited” to the alliance, and to receive some “guarantees of Ukraine’s security” from American and European leaders, and to have a “deterrence potential”, including an arsenal of conventional weapons sufficient to deliver a sensitive blow to the Russian Federation in case it violates the ceasefire regime. And at this stage — to obtain weapons and other resources capable of turning the situation on the front line and creating conditions for negotiations.
Kyiv would clearly be satisfied with such an arrangement if it became a fundamental element of Ukraine’s obtaining the status of “major US ally outside NATO,” which would at least partially raise the level of relations to that which binds the US, for example, with Israel, Japan, or Australia. However, Ukraine rejected such a partnership back in 2021, and although the question seems to have returned to the agenda after February 24, 2022, the chances of its implementation are slim. As a result, the position of the Ukrainian leadership in relations with the incoming US administration is rather weak.
Unlike Russian leaders, who still have a considerable amount of time and room for maneuver, Zelensky’s team has significantly less of these two resources. Ukraine experiences manpower shortages, growing territorial losses, a drop in public morale due to accumulated war fatigue, lack of prospects, and the feeling that Western allies are “preventing Ukraine from winning” by rationing aid. There is also outrage at corruption at all levels and a sense of injustice regarding the distribution of the war burden within Ukrainian society. Therefore, Zelensky has to be open to negotiations to find diplomatic solutions, especially since it is quite obvious that the public has such a demand.
Under these circumstances, Trump has much more leverage over Zelensky than over Putin, and it is possible that at some point the balance of “carrots and sticks” in Ukrainian politics will shift in favor of the latter. So far, the more or less openly articulated position of the Trump team fits into a simple formula: Kyiv should agree to negotiations with Moscow based on the White House and the State Department’s understanding of the optimal arrangement for a diplomatic solution under the threat of halting military aid, but boosting assistance if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses.
In a sense, such an approach stymies Ukraine’s president, who signed a decree in 2022 forbidding Ukraine from negotiating with Russia as long as Putin is in power. Theoretically, Ukraine could formally cede some of its territory if such a move is approved in a national referendum, which, judging by opinion polls, is unlikely. In other words, there is obviously a built-in contradiction in the vision of the Ukrainian political establishment: a clear understanding of the lack of prospects for defeating Russia on the battlefield and the need to seek a diplomatic solution, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of removing from the official discourse the declared goal of resisting Russian aggression, that is the restoration of Kyiv’s sovereignty over the entire territory of Ukraine within the 1991 borders.
Today, Zelensky’s team does not have many other options. One of them is to continue to insist on inviting Ukraine to NATO with the help of the so-called contact group consisting of France, Poland, Great Britain and Germany, which was launched on December 9, 2024 by Friedrich Merz, candidate to the German chancellor from the CDU party, to develop a common position on ending the war. The Ukrainian presidential administration pitched the initiative as a group of countries that have long-range weapons, that are investing the most in Ukrainian defense production, and on which Ukraine’s accession to NATO depends.
Nevertheless, it is clear that eventually everything will depend on the US position. And it is still unclear whether Kyiv and Moscow are impressed enough by Trump’s reputation as a “hard pragmatist” on foreign policy issues, and by the set of “carrots and sticks” voiced by his men for each side of the conflict, to soften their unyielding positions.
Prof. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin lectures in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and is Academic Chairman of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies in Herzliya, Israel. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post What Is Next for Ukraine and Russia? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’
Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”
Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.
Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.
Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.