Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the signing of MOUs with Argentine President Javier Milei. Photo: Amos Ben-Gershom (GPO)

Argentine President Javier Milei was awarded the $1 million Genesis Prize in Jerusalem on Thursday, in recognition of his unwavering support for Israel and commitment to Jewish values, during a three-day visit to the Jewish state.

During a ceremony at the Museum of Tolerance, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Genesis Prize Foundation Chairman Stan Polovets presented the award to Milei, praising the Argentine leader as a “moral voice of clarity” on the international stage.

Milei waived his $1 million prize, and at his behest the Genesis Prize Foundation will donate the money to a nonprofit organization established to support Milei’s Isaac Accords initiative. The idea is modeled after the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries — aimed at strengthening diplomatic ties between Israel and Latin American nations.

“In this difficult moment, I stand with you in solidarity, offering a fraternal embrace and a heartfelt ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’” Milei said during his acceptance speech, referring to the Hebrew expression meaning “the people of Israel live.”

Established in 2013, the annual $1 million prize — dubbed the “Jewish Nobel” by TIME magazine — honors individuals “for their outstanding professional achievements, contribution to humanity, and deep commitment to Jewish values.”

According to the Genesis Prize Foundation, Milei is the first non-Jewish recipient of the award and the first head of state to receive it in recognition of his unwavering support for Israel, commitment to democratic values, and resolute stand against terrorism and antisemitism.

“We must end Israel’s isolation on the world stage. Together with President Milei, we will start in Latin America and help make his dream of Isaac Accords a reality,” Polovets said during the ceremony.

“Milei’s support is not only symbolic. His Isaac Accords vision is a geopolitical strategy that can bring tangible results in Latin America,” he continued. “This is more than a prize. It’s a call to action.”

Polovets continued, “We want to encourage South and Central American countries to emulate Argentina’s example by strengthening relations with Israel, voting with – not against – Israel in the UN, cooperating on security matters, and promoting market-oriented democratic reforms across the region.”

The Genesis Prize Foundation announced it will partner with organizations such as StandWithUs, the Israel Allies Foundation, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and Yalla Israel to support the launch of Milei’s initiative.

Since taking office over a year ago, Milei has been one of Israel’s most vocal supporters, strengthening bilateral relations to unprecedented levels and in the process breaking with decades of Argentine foreign policy tradition to firmly align with Jerusalem and Washington.

Last week, Milei embarked on a 10-day international tour — the longest since he took office — with planned stops in Italy, France, Spain, and Israel, where he spent the most time.

During his visit to the Jewish state, Milei announced that Argentina would move its embassy to Jerusalem next year, joining the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, and Papua New Guinea in doing so and recognizing the city as Israel’s capital.

On Thursday, the Argentine leader also signed a “Memorandum of Understanding for Democracy and Freedom” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to strengthen cooperation against terrorism and antisemitism.

The agreement is intended as a counterweight to the MoU signed by former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with Iran, which allegedly covered up the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

The post Argentina’s Milei Receives Genesis Prize in Jerusalem, Award Money to Support Israel-Latin America ‘Isaac Accords’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

An “Apartheid Wall” erected by Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Photo: X/Twitter

A pro-Hamas student group whose campus activism heightened scrutiny of antisemitism and far-left extremism at Harvard University has filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit the school filed to halt the Trump administration’s confiscation of its taxpayer-funded grants and contracts.

Legal counsel for the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), provided by the controversial Palestine Legal nonprofit, submitted the document on Monday to the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, The Algemeiner has learned. Endorsing Harvard’s push for a summary judgement in its favor, the court filing argues that the school’s alleged neglecting to restrict antisemitic demonstrations did not violate the civil rights of Jewish students.

“The expression of views critical of Israel — even where it personally offends — is not actionable harassment under Title VI [of the US Civil Rights Act],” wrote Palestine Legal attorney Radhika Sainath. “Defendants have not specifically alleged what actions they believe created a severe or pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of Title VI — or what educational programs or activities were limited or denied by such acts.”

Sainath continued, comparing Jewish Zionists to segregationists who defended white supremacy during Jim Crow, while comparing anti-Zionists — who have been trafficking racial slurs and epithets about African Americans on social media during the Gaza war — to the civil rights activists of the 1960s.

“Many white parents who supported segregation were discomforted — even frightened — by the prospect of Black children attending schools with their children. But advocacy for the rights of Black Americans to live as equal citizens was not anti-white any more than advocacy for the equal rights of Palestinians is anti-Jewish,” Sainath charged. “In fact, it is opposition to equal rights of Black people that is discriminatory, just as opposition to equal rights for Palestinians is discriminatory.”

The PSC’s entrance into Harvard’s historic legal fight with the Trump administration comes 20 months after it prompted worldwide outrage and condemnation for endorsing Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel in a statement which alleged that “millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”

Mere hours after images and videos of Hamas’s atrocities — which included sexual assaults, abductions, and murders of the young and elderly — spread online, the campus group said, “The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”

Those remarks triggered a cascade of events in which Harvard was accused of fostering a culture of racial grievance and antisemitism and important donors suspended funding for various programs. Additionally, the school’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace after being outed as a serial plagiarist. Her tenure was the shortest in Harvard’s history.

More incidents followed over the next several months. In one notorious episode, a mob of anti-Zionists — including Ibrahim Bharmal, editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review — were filmed following, surrounding, and intimidating a Jewish student. A pro-Hamas faculty group also shared an antisemitic image depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David, containing a dollar sign at its center, dangling a Black man and an Arab man from a noose.

Meanwhile, Harvard acted disingenuously to deceive the public and create a false impression that it was working to combat antisemitism, according to a shocking report issued by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce. One section of the report claimed that the university formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult it in key moments, including when Jewish students were harassed and verbally abused. So frustrated were a “majority” of AAG members with being part of what the committee described behind closed doors as a public relations facade that they threatened to resign from it.

The slew of incidents made Harvard University the face of campus antisemitism and a major target for a surging conservative movement, led by US President Donald Trump, which blamed elite higher education for declining civic patriotism, the rise of antisemitic violence across the US, and the spread of “woke” ideologies which undermine faith in liberal, Western values. After Trump won a historic second, non-consecutive term in office, the school was, within a matter of months, pummeled by a volley of punitive measures, including the confiscation of some $3 billion in federal funds.

“Harvard is an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institute, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart,” Trump said in April, writing on his Truth Social media platform. “The place is a Liberal mess, allowing a certain group of crazed lunatics to enter and exit the classroom and spew fake ANGER and HATE [sic]. It is truly horrific. Now, since our filings began, they act like they are all ‘American Apple Pie.’ Harvard is a threat to democracy.”

In suing the administration to stop the actions, Harvard said the Trump administration bypassed key procedural steps that must, by law, be taken before sequestration of federal funds is enacted. It also charged that the administration does not aim, as it has publicly pledged, to combat campus antisemitism at Harvard but to impose “viewpoint-based conditions on Harvard’s funding” — an argument it supported by pointing to the funding freeze being connected to Trump’s calling for “viewpoint diversity in hiring and admissions,” the “discontinuation of [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives],” and “reducing forms of governance bloat,” a wishlist of conservative policy reforms.

Now, PSC is defending Harvard by arguing that the very policies which set off what is arguably the most tumultuous period in Harvard’s history should be preserved. Drawing more comparisons to unrelated political conflicts, Sainath called for both ruling in Harvard’s favor and rescinding the university’s recent adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

“Though the university purports to be addressing antisemitism, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism via a politicized definition does not make it so, any more than it would be an act of anti-Russian discrimination to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or anti-Hindu discrimination to protest India’s human rights violations in Kashmir,” she concluded. “Indeed, it is only Palestinians on campus, and those advocating on their behalf, who are constrained from engaging in political critiques of their own peoples’ subjugation, dispossession, and killing.”

Other entities have come rushing to Harvard’s defense by citing different reasons for restoring Harvard’s federal funding that stayed clear of Palestine Legal’s arguments seemingly justifying calls for a genocide in Israel. In another amicus brief, attorneys Daniel Cloherty, Victoria Steinberg, and Alexandra Arnold stressed on behalf of two dozen American colleges and universities — including Brown University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Dartmouth College — the importance of the federal government’s role as a benefactor of higher education.

“For over 80 years, the federal government has invested heavily in scientific research at US universities,” the attorneys wrote. “This funding has fueled American leadership at home and abroad, yielding radar technology that helped the Allies win World War II, computer systems that put human on the Moon, and a vaccine that saved millions during the global pandemic.”

They added, “Broad cuts to federal funding endanger this longstanding, mutually beneficial arrangement between universities and the American public. Terminating funding disrupts ongoing projects, ruins experiments and datasets, destroys the careers of aspiring scientists, and deters investment in the long term research that only the academy — with federal funding — can pursue, threatening the pace of progress and undermining American leadership in the process.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Pro-Hamas Student Group That Cheered Oct. 7 Massacre Wants to Defend Harvard in Legal Fight Against Trump first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, on June 24, 2024. Photo: IMAGO/epd via Reuters Connect

A hotel in Sarajevo, the Swissotel, chose to cancel hosting the Conference of European Rabbis’ (CER) biannual Standing Committee meeting next week after public pressure from Adnan Delic, the federal minister of labor and social policy for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“Chief Rabbis from all over Europe, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, were due to convene to discuss the most pressing issues facing European Jewish life today and matters of freedom of religion or belief. Shockingly, the hotel has suddenly canceled on us,” CER’s president, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This decision to block a European-Jewish conference on European soil is not only alarming but also revealing.”

Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow, added, “Bosnia and Herzegovina should certainly be canceled and barred from accession to the European Union following this disgraceful castigation of a European faith group. Sarajevo has proclaimed itself a ‘city of openness and tolerance’ for anyone but Jews.”

An open letter from Delic, republished in local media, savaged Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, and insisted that permitting the conference would signal justification for genocide.

“Sarajevo must not be a stage for supporting genocide,” Delic wrote, apparently referring to the erroneous accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. “As a man living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as someone who believes in the values ​​of truth, justice, and the dignity of every human being, I express my strongest protest against the announcement of the European Conference of Rabbis to be held from June 16th to 18th in Sarajevo.”

Delic called the hosting of the event “illogical, deeply unacceptable, and even morally offensive,” charging that “in Sarajevo, a city that has survived the longest siege in modern European history, a city where children have been killed, hospitals targeted, and markets shelled, a rally is being organized to send support to the occupier who, every day, in front of the eyes of the entire world, commits genocide against the innocent civilian population of Gaza.”

Dismissing the idea that the conference promoted peace, Delic wrote that the conference was “essentially an attempt to send a message from Sarajevo, a symbol of resistance, survival, and human endurance, legitimizing a genocidal entity and its shameful acts of crimes against humanity. It is directly contrary to everything Sarajevo is and has stood for throughout history.”

Delic demanded “in the name of the dignity of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the victims of all sieges, persecutions, and war crimes” and for “all competent institutions to prevent the realization of this gathering, and on citizens and civil society organizations not to remain silent in the face of an attempt to morally humiliate our capital and our country.”

Goldschmidt responded to the open letter, saying that “no other Bosnian Government official has contacted the Conference of European Rabbis. We have been made unwelcome and this last-minute, ministerial boycott of Jewish European citizens, dedicated to purely to promoting Jewish life in Europe and furthering dialogue and democracy across the continent, is disgraceful.”

Jakob Finci, who serves as president of the Jewish Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, described the cancellation as a “slap in the face that Sarajevo has given itself.”

The conference will now take place from Monday through Wednesday in Munich.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Survey of antisemitic attitudes in countries across the world, 57 percent of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s adult population — 1.5 million people — embraces animosity toward the Jewish people, supporting six or more bigoted stereotypes. These numbers rank the Eastern European nation at 79th out of 103 surveyed countries and 15th out 17 in the region — some of the highest levels of antisemitism on the planet.

On Thursday, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) released a statement condemning the cancellation.

“For generations, Sarajevo — once known as the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’ — was a city of coexistence, where people of different religions could live side-by-side,” the WJC wrote on X. “The decision to cancel the long-planned Conference of European Rabbis meeting at the urging of Minister Delic is a shameful act of antisemitism and an affront to the Bosnian capital’s rich history as a cultural melting pot on European soil. The failure to ensure security for this gathering is an ominous sign for the future of Jewish safety.”

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, responded to the cancellation on X, writing that “another symptom of the mainstreaming of a new lethal strain of ever-mutating antisemitism – that demonizes, delegitimizes & applies double standards to ‘the Jew’ among nations – ‘justifying’ the targeting of Jews & threatening Jewish life.”

The post Bosnian Hotel Cancels European Rabbi Conference After Gov’t Minister Calls Israel a ‘Genocidal Entity’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.