World Jewish News
Kamala Harris is No Friend to Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIK A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America.
That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.
For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast!
Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.
Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” — worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.
The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less.
Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”
Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.”
We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis.
“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”
“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.
On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel.
Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”
Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.”
Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added.
“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.
The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.
Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.
All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.
Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.
“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.
Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.
But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.
Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.
Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.
I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government.
And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons — there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones — and ideological ones — progressive woke ideology — but do Jews have to go along with this?
(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.)
“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
World Jewish News
Can Donald Trump “Fix” Higher Education in the United States?
By HENRY SREBRNIK When protests disrupted campuses nationwide in the United States last year celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, signs and chants demanded “Divest!” and “Cease-fire now!” This fall, much of the protest language has grown darker, echoing language used by Hamas, and declaring “Glory to the resistance!”
Some protesters now refer to them as the “al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas uses. “Oct. 7 IS FOREVER” has been spray-painted on walls at colleges. The shift is very apparent at Columbia University in New York, one of the main centres of the protests.
This new messaging has been noticed by Hillel chapters across the country, observed Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International. “The overall picture on campus,” he said, “has moved from a mass protest movement that embodied a diverse set of goals and rhetoric to this more concentrated and therefore more extreme and radical set of goals, tactics and rhetoric.”
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to crack down on these campus protests, and his allies expect the Department of Education to more aggressively investigate university responses to pro-Palestinian movements.
“If you get me re-elected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he told donors last May. Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”
In an Agenda47 policy video released last July, he asserted that “the time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.” Trump promised to axe federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “antisemitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
At a recent antisemitism event in Washington DC, he pledged to protect Jewish students on American campuses. “Here is what I will do to defeat antisemitism and defend our Jewish citizens in America,” he declared. “My first week back in the Oval Office my Administration will inform every College president that if you do not end antisemitic propaganda they will lose their accreditation and federal support.”
He announced that he “will inform every educational institution in our land that if they permit violence, harassment or threats against Jewish students the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.
“It’s very important Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law and they’re going to get it. At the same time, my Administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students and Jewish people on American streets.”
When back in the White House, Trump announced that he would direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination “under the guise of equity” and will advance a measure to have schools that continue these illegal and unjust policies fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.
Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms, the Stand Columbia Society, which is dedicated to restoring the university’s “excellence,” has identified a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university. They estimate Columbia could lose out on $3.5 billion in federal funding should they face government retaliation.
The most likely action, according to the group, would be for the government to slow down on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students by curbing issuance of student visas.
Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money. Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action.
Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, colour, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews.
Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI.
Columbia, for its part, already faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. (Among other major universities, Harvard faces two, and the University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list.)
“These problems have existed for some time,” a contributing member of Stand Columbia, Alexandra Zubko, who is a Columbia graduate, contends. “This might be the moment that administrators look in the mirror and decide that they can’t let them continue.”
“All we need to do is listen to what President Trump has said during his campaign to understand that this administration will be serious about enforcing anti discrimination laws in ways that could be problematic to those institutions that have been getting a free pass for too long,” Marcus has said.
With Trump promising to make higher education “great again” once he returns to office this coming January, American universities will face increasing pressure to comply with his administration, if they don’t want to lose billions in federal support.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
World Jewish News
Canadian University Hires Convicted Terrorist Who Bombed Paris Synagogue to Teach ‘Social Justice’
Carleton University in Ontario, Canada is being castigated for hiring convicted terrorist Hassan Diab — who carried out a 1980 bombing of a synagogue in Paris, which killed four Jewish worshippers and injured dozens of others — as a professor.
Diab, 70, is teaching at least one course in Carleton University’s sociology department this fall, according to B’nai Brith Canada, a Jewish civil rights group. He will lecture on “social justice in action.” So far, no high level administrative official has attempted to explain what merited his being hired.
A former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who is currently the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by French law enforcement, Diab was found guilty in 2023 in absentia of detonating a bomb at Rue Copernic synagogue on Oct. 3, 1980, an attack which coincided with Shabbat. The French court last year sentenced him to life in prison and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Decades passed between the incident and Diab’s conviction, owing to his elusiveness and oscillations of a criminal justice system which ordered his extradition on charges of terrorism, dropped them, and then reinstated them when the case reached France’s highest judicial body, the Court of Cassation. Throughout the proceedings, Diab has professed his innocence and even compared himself to Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer falsely convicted of espionage in a landmark case that sparked antisemitic violence across France.
“Despite being handed a life sentence by a French court, Hassan Diab continues to live freely in Canada, while Carleton University, unconscionably, continues to allow him the privilege of teaching at a Canadian institution,” B’nai Brith Canada said in a statement, which included a link to a petition calling for the termination of Diab’s employment. “The university has ignored B’nai Brith’s formal request to terminate his position, allowing Diab to remain in a position of authority over students.”
It continued, “Carleton’s silence is deeply disturbing. Its decision to continue to employ Diab not only presents a danger to the well-being of its students, but it is an insult to the memory of innocent victims of his heinous crime and an affront to all Canadians who value law and order. This must change! We must act now!”
Carleton University has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.
Diab, a Lebanese-Canadian academic, is not the first PFLP terrorist to find refuge in academia. Leila Khaled, who hijacked a Tel Aviv-bound plane in 1969 and attempted another hijacking, this time of an El Al flight, in 1970 — has been invited to speak at San Francisco State University, the University of California, Merced, and New York University. Additionally, Khaled has a strong following among radical activists in the American anti-Zionist movement, in which she is highly praised as “the poster girl of Palestinian militancy.” American lawmakers, however, have described Khaled as “unrepentant” and suggested that inviting her to an American campus violates anti-terrorism laws.
In Diab’s case, Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, in which he is currently employed, has effusively advocated ignoring France’s request for extradition, which would result in Diab’s serving the life sentence to which he was sentenced for his crime.
“Dr. Diab has been caught in a political nightmare in which the existence of accuse has become the foundation for a guilty finding in a trial with no official transcripts and no opportunity for appeal,” the department said in 2023. “While our hearts go out to the victims, families, and communities hurt by this act of antisemitic terror, causing further damage to the life of an innocent man and continued harm to his family will not heal their pain. Canada must refuse to extradite Hassan Diab and end his 15-year long ordeal.”
Jewish civil rights leaders in France, however, support the court’s findings and have demanded Canadian compliance with the two countries’ extradition treaty.
“Forty-three years after the attack on the Rue Copernic synagogue, Hassan Diab is sentenced to life imprisonment,” Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), said following the verdict. “Everything must now be done to enforce the international arrest warrant. CRIF calls on Canada to cooperate with the French justice system. CRIF expresses its solidarity with the families of the victims, who have devoted their lives to ensuring that justice is done.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Canadian University Hires Convicted Terrorist Who Bombed Paris Synagogue to Teach ‘Social Justice’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
World Jewish News
Samidoun: Organization founded in Canada listed as terrorist entity by Government of Canada
On October 15 the Government of Canada officially listed an organization known as Samidoun as a terrorist organization.
Here is part of the statement released by Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc on October 15 :
“Violent extremism, acts of terrorism or terrorist financing have no place in Canadian society or abroad.”
“The listing of Samidoun as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code sends a strong message that Canada will not tolerate this type of activity, and will do everything in its power to counter the ongoing threat to Canada’s national security and all people in Canada.”
Leblance also noted that the listing was made alongside the U.S. Treasury Department’s own decision to list the group as a specially designated global terrorist entity.
Samidoun is an organization founded by someone by the name of Charlotte Kates.
According to the National Post, Kates has a long history of supporting violent terrorist organizations.
Born in New Jersey, Kates, now 44, attended Rutgers University. Kates, who is Caucasian, describes herself as “not religious.”
According to the National Post. Kates began Samidoun in 2011.
This past spring, according to the Post, “she made headlines after Vancouver police arrested her for praising the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas against southern Israel as ‘heroic and brave.’ At the same rally on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, she led the crowd in a chant of ‘Long live October 7.’ She has yet to be charged, but national Jewish advocacy groups say she ought to be for hate speech.”
Here is what the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs posted on October 15: “Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network) is a registered Canadian not-for-profit with direct affiliation and clear ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – an organization that has been placed on the list of terrorist entities under Canada’s Criminal Code since 2003.
“There is ample open-source information that ties Samidoun to the PFLP. In 2021, Israel designated Samidoun a terror group based on the organization’s direct affiliation with and ties to the PFLP. In 2023, Germany outlawed Samidoun due to their activities that promoted terrorism. Samidoun’s leadership was deported from Germany in 2019 and denied entry to the EU in 2022, both times being returned to Canada.
“Most disturbing to Canada’s Jewish community, Samidoun has a significant and active presence in Canada where it holds events, raises funds, runs advocacy campaigns, and organizes activities on university campuses. Regularly, Samidoun officials call for violence and glorify terrorist organizations at these events.”
Now, by being listed as a terrorist organization by the Government of Canada, it becomes a crime to provide Samidoun with “material support.”