A crowd gathers at the Jardin Ilan Halimi in Paris on Feb. 14, 2021, to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Halimi’s kidnapping and murder. Photo: Reuters/Xose Bouzas/Hans Lucas

France’s Jewish community on Tuesday commemorated the 20th anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was brutally tortured to death, as his memory continues to be defaced amid a rising tide of antisemitism threatening Jews and Israelis across the country.

“Twenty years on, Ilan Halimi’s memory still needs to be protected and honored, yet it continues to come under attack, as recent vandalism at his memorial site shows,” the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — wrote in a post on X.

“Antisemitism remains a persistent threat in France today,” the statement read. 

Le 20 janvier 2006 marque l’enlèvement et le début de la séquestration d’Ilan Halimi, 23 ans, parce qu’il était Juif.

20 ans plus tard, alors que la mémoire d’Ilan Halimi doit être protégée et honorée, elle continue d’être atteinte, comme l’ont montré les récents actes de… pic.twitter.com/Htu9ntMHhq

— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 20, 2026

Last week, another olive tree planted to honor Halimi’s memory was vandalized and cut down, as French authorities continue efforts to replant trees in remembrance of the young Jewish man who was murdered in 2006.

“We will bring those responsible to justice,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez wrote in a post on X. “Our collective outrage is matched only by our unwavering determination to combat antisemitic and anti-religious acts that continue to tarnish the memory of an innocent man.”

This latest antisemitic act came after a plaque honoring Halimi was vandalized in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a town in southeastern France, prompting local authorities to open an investigation for “destruction and antisemitic damage.”

According to local reports, a 29-year-old man with no prior criminal record has been arrested. While he admitted to the acts, he denied any antisemitic motive and is now awaiting trial.

Last year, a tree planted in memory of Halimi was also vandalized and cut down in Épinay-sur-Seine, a suburb north of Paris.

Two Tunisian twin brothers were arrested and convicted for cutting down the tree, but were acquitted of the antisemitism charges brought against them.

Both of them were sentenced to eight months in prison, but one of them received a suspended sentence, meaning he will not serve time unless he commits another offense or violates certain conditions.

According to local media, one of the brothers has reportedly been deported from France.

Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.

Three weeks later, Halimi was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.

In 2011, French authorities planted the first olive tree in Halimi’s memory. However, the young Jewish boy’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne, where he was found dying near a railway track.

(JTA) — A Jewish member of Australian Parliament recited the Mourner’s Kaddish in an address Monday to honor the victims of the Hanukkah massacre on Bondi Beach.

The address, delivered by Jewish parliamentarian and former attorney general Mark Dreyfus, came over a month after two gunmen motivated by what authorities said was “Islamic State ideology” opened fire on a celebration in Sydney, killing 15 and injuring dozens more. Most of the victims were Jewish, and Dreyfus read all of their names aloud.

Dreyfus, who wore a kippah for the presentation, then commended the “acts of extraordinary courage” by bystanders and emergency workers during the attack, naming Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Muslim man who received widespread support from the Jewish community after he was shot while disarming one of the attackers. He also told the Australian House of Representatives that the country’s “response cannot be confined to grief,” exhorting his fellow lawmakers to take action around “upholding our laws against hate.”

Then he invited everyone present to rise for the Mourner’s Kaddish, recited in Jewish communities in memory of the dead.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to feel this in your chest, an attack like this hurts all of us,” Dreyfus said, describing the prayer as “a prayer about life, dignity and the hope for peace at times of profound loss.”

The public recitation was redolent of the decision of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to publish the Hebrew text of the prayer on its front page following the murder of 11 Jews in their synagogue there in 2018.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DTtw-r7Dehs/?hl=en

Late Tuesday, Australia’s parliament passed anti-hate speech and gun reform bills initiated in the wake of the attack. The gun reform bill included new checks on firearm license applications and a national gun buy-back program, while the anti-hate speech bill banned hate groups and imposed penalties for preachers who promote hate.

The hate speech component won support from liberal lawmakers who said they had free-speech concerns after it was weakened from its initial version.

“The terrorists at Bondi Beach had hatred in their hearts and guns in their hands,” wrote Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a post on X. “Today we passed new laws that deal with both. Combatting antisemitism and cracking down on guns.”

The new laws come as Australia grapples with another searing antisemitic incident. Late in the day on Monday, five Jewish teenagers in Melbourne were chased for several minutes by a car whose occupants chanted “Heil Hitler” and performed Nazi salutes at them.

The boys, aged 15 and 16 and easily identifiable as Orthodox Jews, were walking home from Adass High School when the incident occurred in the proximity of Adass Israel Synagogue, which was firebombed in December 2024. No arrests were immediately made.

“The antisemitic hate incident last night in St Kilda targeting young Jewish boys has no place in our country,” Albanese in a statement, according to The Australian. “At a time when Australians are joining with the Jewish community in sorrow and solidarity, it is beyond disgusting to see these cowards shouting Nazi slogans at young people.”

The post Mourner’s Kaddish for Bondi Beach victims recited in Australian parliament as tougher hate crime laws pass appeared first on The Forward.

A student puts on their anti-Israel graduation cap reading “From the river to the sea” at the People’s Graduation, hosted for Mahmoud Khalil and other students from New York University. Photo: Angelina Katsanis via Reuters Connect

Anti-Zionist groups operating in the US are using social media to spread anti-Israel propaganda confected by foreign terrorist organizations based in Gaza and elsewhere across the Middle East, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

“Protesters and activists are not merely praising the activity of terror groups; they are actively sharing their official propaganda, disseminating communiqués, videos, and other materials directly into mainstream platforms,” says the report, titled “Digital Couriers.”

“This propaganda spread functions to normalize the eliminationist goals and terrorist tactics espoused by groups like Hamas and the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] within certain activist circles in the US,” the report continues. “It blurs the line between legitimate protest and explicit endorsement of terrorism and antisemitic violence.”

The groups employ a number of social media platforms to further the mission, including “Resistance News Network” (RNN) on Telegram, a “radical, antisemitic, anti-Zionist” channel which “plays a key role in getting translated terrorist content into the hands of American activists, while also creating and packaging its own content and glorifying terror attacks and other violence.”

Instagram is another online service which pro-Hamas activists use as a news wire. It is especially popular with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an organization that has been central to the campus antisemitism crisis that has seen Jewish students harassed, excluded, and assaulted at colleges across the US.

SJP, the ADL says, has shared messages by Hamas spokesmen, commemorated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel as a day of celebration for the anti-Zionist movement, and shared footage from that day in which a Hamas fighter was “inside the home of an Israeli family.”

The ADL argues social media platforms should aim for “disrupting the pipeline,” enforcing their “existing policies” which already proscribe sharing content of foreign terrorist groups. College and universities, it continues, are responsible for ensuring that students do not do so and break federal law in the process.

“More broadly, it is incumbent upon the general public to engage in due diligence when consuming and sharing content online and associating with activist groups and individuals,” the report concludes.

Anti-Zionist groups have been flagged before for functioning as arms of Hamas while promoting Islamism as well as the geopolitical aims of countries such as Iran.

In October, SJP’s national office (NSJP) appeared to call for executing Muslim “collaborators” working with Israel in retaliation for the death of Palestinian influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi during a brewing conflict between the Hamas terrorist group and a rival clan, Doghmush, in Gaza City.

“Saleh’s martyrdom is a testament to the fact that the fight against Zionism in all its manifestations — from the [Israel Defense Forces] to its collaborators — must continue,” the group said in a statement posted on social media. “In the face of hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians these past two years alone, collaborators and informants maintain their spineless disposition as objects of Zionist influence against their own people.”

The statement launched a series of unfounded charges alleging that anti-Hamas forces are “exploiting Gaza’s youth for money” and pilfering “desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism.” NSJP added, “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.”

Additionally, NSJP has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US, saying in 2024 that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of setting off “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued that statement, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.

“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an SJP spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”

Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.

“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”

Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters.

In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.