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Category: antisemitism

  • Students Left Out of Discussions About Student Gaza Protests 

     

    Recent student-led campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine prompted considerable media conversation. But, according to a new FAIR study examining TV and newspaper discussions in the period from April 21 to May 12, those conversations rarely included students themselves—and even fewer included student protesters.

    FAIR examined how often key corporate media discussion forums contain student and activist voices. The Sunday morning shows (ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday) brought on no students or activists, opting instead to speak primarily with government officials.

    The daily news shows we surveyed—CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News‘ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour—were slightly better, with six students out of 79 guests, but only two of them were pro-Palestine protesters.

    The op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal featured two students out of 52 writers, only one of whom was a protester.

    Sunday Shows: Student-Free Zone

    The agenda-setting Sunday morning shows, which historically skew towards government officials (FAIR.org, 8/12/20, 10/21/23), showed no interest in giving airtime to student or activist voices. For the first weeks following the first encampment set up at Columbia University, when the student protests began to command national media attention, FAIR analyzed every episode of ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday.

    Out of 36 one-on-one and roundtable guests across all networks, 29 (81%) were current or former government officials or politicians, and five (14%) were journalists. One academic and one think tank representative were also featured. Of the 29 government sources, only six spoke about having personal experience with the protests, or about universities in states they represent.

    Occupations of Sunday Show Guests on Campus Encampments

    No students or activists, and only one academic, were invited to speak on any of the Sunday shows. The one academic, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, didn’t speak about his own experience with the encampments, but about his research on student safety.

    Some guests utilized inflammatory language when discussing the protesters, who were never afforded the opportunity to defend themselves. On This Week, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (ABC, 5/5/24), referred to the encampments as “Little Gazas,” and said the students “deserved our contempt” and “mockery.” “I mean, they’re out there in their N95 masks in the open air, with their gluten allergies, demanding that Uber Eats get delivered to them,” he said. Later on, Cotton referred to a keffiyeh—a symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity—that protesters had put on a statue of George Washington as a “terrorist headdress.”

    Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings, lies on the ground.

    Jeffrey Miller lies on the pavement, one of four students killed when the National Guard was sent in to suppress protests at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

    Three guests were asked about the idea of bringing in the National Guard to quell protests, only one declared it to be a bad idea. The other two gave similarly equivocal answers: Sen. J.D. Vance (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) said, “I don’t know if you need to call in the National Guard,” while Republican congressional candidate Tiffany Smiley (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) responded, “I don’t know if the National Guard is necessary.” But both agreed that some kind of police response was needed to these student protests.

    In most other instances, the host would ask a politician for their thoughts on the encampments, to which the guest would respond with platitudes about nonviolence. For instance, CNN‘s Jake Tapper (5/5/24) asked Biden adviser Mitch Landrieu whether groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “causing unrest for the American people.” Landrieu responded, “Everybody has a right to protest, but they have to protest peacefully.”

    Framing the questions

    Throughout the Sunday show discussions, there was a heavy focus on whether the protests were violent and antisemitic, and next to no explanation of the demands of the protesters. Even though violence by—as opposed to against—campus protesters was very uncommon, politicians continually framed the protests as a threat to safety. White House national security communications advisor John Kirby (This Week, 4/28/24) decried “the antisemitism language that we’ve heard of late, and…all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”

    Of all 64 questions asked to guests, only one—CNN’s interview with LA Mayor Karen Bass (4/28/24)—mentioned divestment, the withdrawal of colleges’ investments from companies linked to the Gaza military campaign and/or Israel, which was the central demand of most of the encampments. Moreover, this was the only instance in which divestment was discussed by any host or guest on the Sunday shows. On the other hand, 20 of the 36 conversations named antisemitism as an issue.

    Antisemitism and Divestment in Sunday Show Interviews

    There were two questions asked about the safety of Jewish students (CNN, 4/28/24, 5/5/24)—by which CNN meant pro-Israel Jewish students, as many Jewish students took part in the encampments. (Forty-two percent of young Jewish Americans say Israel’s response to October 7 is “unacceptable,” according to Pew Research Center polling.) Only one question was asked about the safety of Muslim students (CNN, 5/5/24), even though both groups reported feeling almost equally unsafe.

    All questions on violence related to the protesters, and not to counter-protesters or law enforcement. The interview with Bass (CNN, 4/28/24) made no mention of the violent counter-protests at UCLA that sent 25 protesters to the emergency room, but instead focused on hypothetical dangers to pro-Israel students.

    Weekday News Shows: Rare Sightings of Protesters

    In the same period as the study on Sunday shows, FAIR analyzed every episode of CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News’ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour. These daily programs were chosen as representative, highly rated daily news shows that have a focus on political discussion. Although the evening shows, unlike the Sunday shows, included occasional student voices, they were far outnumbered by government officials, journalists and educators—and only two student guests were protesters.

    Of the 79 guests who appeared on these shows, 23 (29%) were current or former government officials and politicians, 19 (24%) were university-level educators and administrators, 18 (23%) were journalists, six (8%) were students and 13 (16%) had other jobs.

     

    Occupations of Weekday News Guests on Campus Encampments

    These shows showed more variation across the networks than the Sunday shows. Sixty-five percent of PBS NewsHour‘s guests were university-affiliated, for instance, and none were government officials, while almost two-thirds of Hannity‘s guests on Fox News (64%) were government officials and politicians, with no educators or students appearing.

    PBS NewsHour: Protests on Campus

    The three student journalists found on daily news shows all appeared together on one episode of the PBS NewsHour (4/30/24).

    There were a total of six students invited among the 79 guests, accounting for fewer than 8% of all interviewees. Two of these were pro-Palestine protesters, both appearing on MSNBC‘s ReidOut (4/22/24, 4/30/34). Three were nonaligned student journalists, all appearing together on PBS (4/30/24), and one, a student government leader at Columbia, was an Israeli who supported her government (CNN, 4/30/24).

    One of the students on ReidOut (4/30/24), identified only by his first name, Andrew, described the police brutality at Washington University in St. Louis: “I was held in custody for six hours. I wasn’t provided food or water, and I have since been suspended and banned from my campus.”

    Andrew was one of just two guests who mentioned police brutality. The other student protester, Marium Alwan, told host Joy Reid (4/22/24) that the Columbia encampment, and all encampments, “stand for liberation and human rights and equality for Jewish people, Palestinians.” When asked about antisemitism, she said they “stand against hateful rhetoric.”

    Maya Platek, the only student featured on CNN‘s Lead (4/30/24), was president elect of the Columbia School of General Studies (and former head content writer for the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit). She said that at Columbia, she “would not say that I have been feeling the most comfortable.” She called the idea of divesting from Israel, and suspending Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University, “completely atrocious.”

    Completely shutting out student voices, Fox News prioritized right-wing politicians like former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to speak on the protests. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Hannity, 4/30/24) compared the encampments to “Poland pre–World War II” and “Kristallnacht.”

    CNN: Robert Kraft Condemns Antisemitism at Columbia University

    New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft (CNN, 4/22/24) was brought on to talk about student protests more often than all student protesters put together.

    CNN‘s Lead, the show with the second-highest number of government official guests (35%), featured more centrists than did Hannity. Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (5/1/24) said that while “it’s their First Amendment right” to protest, for students to say such as “go back to Poland or bomb Tel Aviv or kill all the Zionists” was not acceptable, a message similar to those frequently heard on the Sunday shows.

    Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a major donor to Columbia University, was invited to speak about encampments three times (Fox, 4/22/24, 5/1/24; CNN, 4/22/24)—more times than student protesters spoke across all four shows.

    Although a slight improvement over the Sunday shows’ complete shut-out of student voices, these daily news shows still had relatively few references to divestment, which came up in 16 interviews (20%), or police violence, mentioned in seven interviews. This compares to 33 interviews (42%) that discussed antisemitism.

    Mentions of Antisemitism, Divestment and Police Violence in Weekday News Show Interviews

    Newspaper Op-Eds: Views From a Staffer’s Desk

    NYT: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

    Free-speech celebrant John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times (4/23/24) that wondered why students were allowed to protest against Israel.

    The opinion columns of corporate newspapers did no better at including student protesters’ voices than the TV shows. FAIR analyzed every op-ed primarily about the campus encampments in the same time span (April 21–May 12), from the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

    In the observed period, the Times published 11 op-eds about the campus encampments, all written by Times columnists. The paper failed to include any students or activists in its opinion section.

    Out of nine different Times columnists, only one mentioned visiting an encampment: John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia professor who writes regularly for the paper, was critical of the protests happening at his university. The self-styled free-speech advocate demanded to know, “Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”

    During the same period, the Washington Post also ran 11 encampment-related op-eds. Ten were written by regular columnists, and two mentioned having visited an encampment. Those two—Karen Attiah (5/2/24) and Eugene Robinson (4/29/24)—wrote positively of the protests. Attiah wrote of her visit:

    Around me, students were reading, studying and chatting. Some were making art and painting. I saw an environment rich with learning, but I did not see disruption.

    The paper’s only guest column on the encampments was penned by Paul Berman (4/26/24), a Columbia graduate and writer for the center-right Jewish magazine Tablet, who opined that the student protesters had “gone out of their minds,” and that professors were to blame for “intellectual degeneration.” Like the Times, the Post failed to include any students or activists in their opinion section.

    ‘We bruise, we feel’

    USA Today: I'm a student who was arrested at a Columbia protest. I am not a hero, nor am I a villain.

    In the only op-ed the study found written by a student protester (USA Today, 5/8/24), Columbia’s Allie Wong was able to succinctly state the objective of the encampments: “We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”

    USA Today published fewer encampment-related opinion pieces, but invited more outside perspectives. Of its seven columns during the study period, four were written by regular columnists, one by Columbia student protester Allie Wong (5/8/24), one by pro-Israel advocate Nathan J. Diament (4/22/24) and one by the son of Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel (5/2/24).

    In her op-ed, Wong described the police brutality exhibited during her and other protesters’ arrests:

    We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.

    Wong’s piece was also the only one in USA Today to mention divestment, and one of only three pieces to mention divestment among all op-eds in the study. (The other two, from the Wall Street Journal, called the divestment demands “useless”—4/30/24—and “a breach of fiduciary obligation”—5/5/24.)

     

    Mentions of Antisemitism and Divestment in Opinion Pieces

    ‘Fraternities a cure’

    WSJ: Fraternities Are a Cure for What Ails Higher Education

    The Wall Street Journal (5/9/24) ran an editorial calling fraternities the antidote to encampments, written by someone who sells insurance to fraternities.

    The Wall Street Journal had the most op-eds of the four papers. Its 22 pieces on the encampments included four by educators and one by a student. Unlike most other student and educator voices across our study, however, the student and educator guests on the Journal were highly critical of the protests.

    Dawn Watkins Wiese (5/9/24) wrote a column titled “Fraternities Are a Cure for What Ails Higher Education,” asserting that the counter-protesters instigating violence at UNC “acted bravely.” Wiese is the chief operating officer of FRMT Ltd., an insurer of fraternities.

    Ben Sasse (5/3/24), president of the University of Florida (and a former Republican senator), charged that the students were uneducated: “‘From the river to the sea.’ Which river? Which sea?” he wrote, suggesting that students didn’t know what they were protesting about.

    The one student on the Journal‘s op-ed pages, Yale’s Gabriel Diamond (4/21/24), called for the expulsion of his protesting classmates for being “violent.” According to Yale Daily News president Anika Seth (4/30/24), no violence had been documented at the school’s encampment.

    Takeaways: Avoid Demands

    Across corporate media, the lack of student and protester voices in discussions of student protests is striking. Virtually every university has student journalists, yet only four of them were found in the study, compared to the more than 50 non-student journalists and columnists, the vast majority of whom gave no sign of ever having been to an encampment.

    Despite polling that found Jewish and Muslim students feeling almost equally unsafe, antisemitism was mentioned in 88 different interviews and editorials, while Islamophobia was mentioned in only six interviews and one op-ed (Washington Post, 5/2/24). Divestment was only mentioned 26 times, despite it being the principal goal of the encampments.

    Mentions of Antisemitism, Divestment and Islamophobia, Combined Media

    The Palestine campus protests were not the first time corporate media avoided the demands of protesters. A 2020 FAIR study (8/12/20) of coverage of Black Lives Matter protests showed a “heavy focus on whether the protests were violent or nonviolent, rather than on the demands of the protesters,” a description that applies equally well to the coverage and commentary examined in this study.

    Research assistance: Owen Schacht 

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Right-wing Israel lobby group goes after Clive Lewis – but ends up making his point for him

    A right-wing pro-Israel lobby group is going after a left-leaning Labour Party MP. Specifically, Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS) has called for Norwich South MP Clive Lewis’s expulsion from the party. Unsurprisingly, the group has lodged a complaint to the party against Lewis for alleged antisemitism.

    Of course, we’ve been here before – as it wouldn’t be the first time LAAS smeared the Labour left with baseless allegations of antisemitism.

    Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is of course the most prominent casualty of this long-standing stitch up. Now, LAAS has turned its sights on Lewis for speaking out against Israel.

    Clive Lewis: dehumanisation of Palestinians linked to UK far-right pogroms

    Specifically, Clive Lewis made the connection between the West’s dehumanisation and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the far-right Islamophobic pogroms in the UK.

    Of course, Lewis was right to drive this home. The UK’s Islamophobia cannot be extricated from this – because racism doesn’t manifest in a vacuum. It’s perfectly evident to anyone remotely paying attention that after ten months of corporate media and political establishment genocide apologism, white supremacy and Zionism runs through the very core of the UK right.

    Plus, as the Canary’s Steve Topple previously wrote:

    Allowing Black and brown people to be demonised over here helps with the West’s global agenda of making them subhuman. How else do you think Israel could get away with killing 40,000 Palestinians without the UN sending in peacekeepers or the US invading?

    Ergo, it’s easy to imagine even on a surface level how devaluing Palestinian lives – largely Muslim – would lead to the same thing here. In fact, it has been plain to see. In February, Middle East Monitor (MEM) reported that Islamophobic attacks had risen by 235% since 7 October. Some on X poignantly summed this up:

    The fact actually is that it’s worse than Lewis’s relatively mild post actually suggested:

    Tommy Robinson’s Zionist connections

    And this only really scratches the surface. Key race riot inciter Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – Tommy Robinson – has multifarious links to the Zionist movement. Lowkey has detailed these:


    For one, he was co-founder of the English Defence League (EDL) with Israeli intelligence employee Paul Ray:

    And there were more relationships:

    Naturally, his ties don’t end there. As the Times of Israel reported, Philadelphia-based think tank Middle East Forum has been bankrolling Robinson:

    Daniel Pipes, MEF’s president, confirmed to The Times of Israel that his group has spent roughly $60,000 on three demonstrations defending Robinson’s legal trial.

    Pipes said that he first met Robinson in December 2017 and was “impressed” by him. He described Robinson as part of a group of people who are “trying to sustain their civilization, trying to keep Europe Europe, trying to keep the West the West. Overall, I think that their effort is sound and needed.”

    In fact, it noted that multiple right-wing pro-Israel organisations have been sponsoring Robinson.

    So, right-wingers can hardly argue there’s no connection between the recent race riot attacks against Muslim, Black, brown, and migrant communities in the UK, and Israel’s ongoing war crimes and genocide. Or so you would think.

    Right-wing lobby group cry antisemitism

    Enter, LAAS, who not only denied this tie altogether, but held it up as an example of antisemitism.

    Director of the right-wing pro-Israel group Alex Hearn told Sky News that:

    It is very concerning that people across the political spectrum, from “anti-racists” to the far right, have fantasised that ‘Zionists’ and Israel are to blame for unrest across Britain,” he said.

    A recent report by the Community Security Trust showed antisemitism in the last six months has gone up 105%, and that the pretext for these 1,978 incidents are often Palestine. This includes synagogues targeted 76 times and 121 assaults.

    For a Labour MP to blame a conflict thousands of miles away for the recent racism in far-right riots in Britain is highly irresponsible.

    When attacks against British Jews exploded following the Hamas 7 October massacre, no such link was made by Mr Lewis.

    However, as SKWAWKBOX underscored:

    The Community Security Trust (CST) is a UK charity deeply committed to promoting Israel and combating the pro-Palestinian ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) campaign against goods and services from illegally-occupied Palestinian territory. It has equated opposition to Israel’s genocide with antisemitism, naming anti-genocide campaigners as the main source of antisemitic incidents.

    Notably, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) unpacked the CST’s claims of a “huge rise” in antisemitism since Israel began its abhorrent genocide. Unsurprisingly, CST had conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

    This has been glaringly obvious as the Western corporate media and right-wing politicians have branded pro-Palestine protest demonstrations as antisemitic on multiple occasions.

    It was almost as if LAAS had an agenda. Of course, as some on X pointed out, this is precisely the case:

    One poster noted that the right-wing genocide-apologist organisation had stark double-standards:

    In other words, the UK mulling an arms embargo to stop Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians: connected to UK antisemitism. Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza: unconnected with the recent assaults on UK Muslims. Got it.

    Politicians must speak out

    CAGE International wondered why other politicians in parliament hadn’t yet had the courage to say it:

    Right on cue, socialist and committed anti-racist John McDonnell backed Clive Lewis’s statement:

    Other politicians like deputy Green Party leader Zack Polanski, and Jewish Labour Party councillor Martin Abrams voiced their support:

    Another Jewish Labour member standing for the party’s National Executive Committee pointed out the attacks showed more about the embedded Islamophobia of Zionists than anything antisemitic:

    In reality, it was actually the right-wing lobby group perpetuating antisemitism:

    LAAS racism

    One person pointed out that LAAS’s racism was hardly anything new:

    Therefore going after a sitting Black MP is entirely on brand as well, as climate and social justice campaigner Asad Rehman noted:

    Thankfully, for once, the Labour Party doesn’t seem to be pandering to Zionists. Astonishingly out of character, we know. According to Independent, the party isn’t planning disciplinary action against Lewis over his post.

    Though, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. Starmer quickly threw Lewis under the bus regardless. According to the outlet:

    The prime minister quickly distanced himself from the remarks, with his spokesperson on Monday saying Sir Keir would “completely disagree” with the suggestion that events in Gaza are to blame for the unrest in Britain, which saw mosques attacked and more than 900 people arrested.

    She added that he would “never seek to conflate those two issues

    At the end of the day, LAAS didn’t expose a left-wing Labour politician as antisemitic. It was quite the opposite in fact. Its petty, motivated complaint only bared the right-wing’s deeply entrenched Islamophobia as part and parcel of its pro-Israel and colonial racism en masse. In other words, it proved that Lewis’s point was correct all along. And that until Palestine is free, this Islamophobic violence in the UK will not end.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • NYT Cynically Suggests Antisemitism Cost Shapiro the VP Slot

     

    Election Focus 2024Haven’t you heard? Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was based in antisemitism. At least, that’s what the New York Times wants us to believe.

    While Democrats of many stripes seemed thrilled with Walz, a Midwestern progressive with military service and a down-home attitude, the Times has kept up the fiction that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made the short list of vice presidential hopefuls, didn’t get the nod because of left-wing antisemitism. The claim is a thinly veiled insinuation that Democrats who oppose the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza—and Shapiro’s aggressive backing of Israel—are motivated by bigotry against Jews.

    ‘Veered past anti-Israel fervor’

    NYT: Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters

    By failing to choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman (8/6/24) wrote, she passed up a chance to “mollify many Jewish voters and other centrists over a subject that has bedeviled the Biden-Harris administration for nearly a year, Israel’s war in Gaza.”

    Jonathan Weisman came out in force in a piece (New York Times, 8/6/24) with the headline “Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters,” and the subhead, “Many Jewish organizations backed Harris’s pick for running mate, but beneath that public sentiment is unease over antisemitism on both the left and the right.”

    Weisman wrote:

    Was her decision to sidestep Mr. Shapiro, some wonder, overly deferential to progressive activists who many Jews believe have veered past anti-Israel fervor into anti-Jewish bigotry?

    The reporter acknowledged that there were “scores of reasons” why Harris might have chosen someone other than Shapiro “that had nothing to do with the campaign that the pro-Palestinian left had been waging against him.” But he added, without citing evidence, that “Jews face a surge of antisemitic sentiment on the left,” and see the Democrats as “harboring strongly anti-Israel sentiment on their left flank.”

    After noting that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump’s influence has been rife with antisemitism, Weisman quoted Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president for the Orthodox Union, saying “our greater worry right now is that antisemitism on the left seems to be far more influential on a major party than the antisemitism on the right.”

    For anyone who needs a reminder, Weisman was demoted at the Times (8/13/19) when he suggested (“C’mon”) that congressmembers Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar are not really from the Midwest, despite representing Detroit and Minneapolis, respectively, any more than Atlanta’s Rep. John Lewis is from the Deep South, or Austin’s Rep. Lloyd Doggett is from Texas—Weisman’s apparent point being that being Muslim, Black or (in Doggett’s case) just liberal disqualifies you as being from such regions. It was just another example (FAIR.org, 8/14/19) of what the Atlantic (5/4/18) meant when it said of his book (((Semitism))), “His facts are wobbly and his prescriptions are thin.”

    ‘Plenty of upsides’

    NYT: Pro-Palestinian Groups Seek to Thwart Josh Shapiro’s Chances for Harris’s V.P.

    Before Harris made her choice, Weisman (New York Times (8/1/24) touted Shapiro as an “opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the center of the party and to independents.”

    This wasn’t Weisman’s only attempt to paint opposition to making Shapiro the Democratic running mate as a sign of Jew hatred. Before Harris’s choice was announced, Weisman wrote a piece (New York Times, 8/1/24) whose subhead said that Shapiro, “an observant Jew, is seen as bringing plenty of upsides to the Democratic ticket,” while “some worry about setting off opposition to the Democratic ticket from pro-Palestinian demonstrators.”

    The false implication was that it was his religion that aroused concern from activists, rather than his record on Israel/Palestine. (The insinuation was even clearer in an online blurb the Times used to promote the piece: “Pro-Palestinian groups are seeking to block Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, from becoming Kamala Harris’s running mate.”)

    Shapiro has been strongly supportive of Israel throughout the Gaza crisis—“We’re praying for the Israelis and we stand firmly with them as they defend themselves as they have every right to do,” he announced early on (Harrisburg Patriot-News, 10/12/23), after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had declared a “full siege” of Gaza, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” (Washington Post, 10/9/23).

    “We are fighting animals, and we will act accordingly,” Gallant declared. As Israel followed through on that promise, Shapiro was criticized for not speaking out against the soaring Palestinian death toll (New Lines, 8/3/24).

    Shapiro assisted in the McCarthyite ousting of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, calling her congressional testimony about student protests a “failure of leadership,” and urging Penn’s trustees to hold her accountable (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/23). The governor later issued an order barring state employees from engaging in “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior—vague terms that were seen as a threat to free speech (Spotlight PA, 5/14/24).

    Shapiro distinguished himself in his vituperation of pro-Palestine activists by comparing them to “people dressed up in KKK outfits” (Jacobin, 8/5/24). “I don’t know anybody who used the Ku Klux Klan when they talked about protesters,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told FAIR. “That’s going pretty far.”

    When Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he “went after Ben and Jerry’s when the ice cream company decided to stop selling to Israeli settlements in the West Bank” (NBC, 7/31/24). He is a strong supporter of divestment, however—when it comes to Muslim countries. “We must use our economic power to isolate our enemies and strengthen our allies,” he said as he introduced a bill mandating that Pennsylvania state pension funds boycott companies that did business with Iran or Sudan (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 4/22/09).

    Shapiro was also forced to “distance himself from a recently uncovered op-ed he wrote in college, in which he identified as a former volunteer in the IDF” (Times of Israel, 8/3/24). The op-ed argued that “peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible,” since “battle-minded” Palestinians “will not coexist peacefully” and “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/2/24).

    Another pre-VP announcement piece in the New York Times (8/2/24), by Jess Bidgood, acknowledged some of this background, but still put Shapiro’s religion before his policy, describing him as “an observant Jew who speaks of his faith often” before noting that

    his outspoken support of Israel’s right to self-defense and his denunciation of college students’ protest of the war in Gaza have also drawn opposition from the left.

    ‘Not captive to the left’

    NYT: Why Josh Shapiro Would Make Such a Difference for Kamala Harris

    Trump advisor Mark Penn (New York Times, 8/3/24) encouraged Harris to choose Shapiro not despite but because of the fact that he is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” and therefore “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”

    Weisman’s pre-announcement piece on Shapiro (8/1/24) contained this nugget:

    The campaign to thwart his nomination is, by its own admission, not well organized. People working against Mr. Shapiro come from groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America; Uncommitted, which waged a campaign to convince Democratic primary voters to register protest votes against President Biden; the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow; and a group of anonymous pro-Palestinian aides on Capitol Hill known as Dear White Staffers. It does not include some of the largest Palestinian rights groups, nor have more prominent progressive groups joined, like Justice Democrats.

    Which raises the question: If this coalition is so weak, why write about it? The Uncommitted campaign, which attracted nearly 1 million votes in the primaries, greatly worried Democrats who supported Biden (NBC, 3/6/24; Guardian, 7/3/24). Biden is now out of the race, and the influence of this coalition had enough impact to grab the concern of the Times.

    In a New York Times op-ed (8/3/24) that pushed for Shapiro as the running mate, pollster Mark Penn—identified by his work with the Clintons from 1995 to 2008, not by his counseling Trump in 2019—said that Shapiro’s presence on the ticket

    would also reassure Jewish voters—long a key part of winning Democratic voter coalitions—at a time when many of them see hostility and antisemitism coming from some in the far left of the party.

    Penn’s op-ed made a flimsy case that concern for Palestinian life is “antisemitic.” But in hailing Shapiro as a moderate, Penn revealed it was his politics, not his identity, that gave the left pause. Shapiro is “unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues,” Penn noted. This is a good thing, in Penn’s view; picking Shapiro as a running mate “would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology.”

    ‘Won’t assuage concerns’

    NYT: ‘I Am Proud of My Faith’: Shapiro’s Fiery Speech Ends on a Personal Note

    The New York Times Katie Glueck (8/6/24) depicted scrutiny of Shapiro’s Israel/Palestine positions as ” an ugly final phase of Ms. Harris’s search.”

    Following Harris’s announcement of Walz as her running mate Times reporter Katie Glueck (8/6/24) wrote that

    after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search process that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel, Mr. Shapiro’s familiar references to his religious background took on a raw new resonance.

    “He seemed to sound a note of defiance” by saying “I am proud of my faith,” Glueck wrote.

    Although his Mideast positions were “well within the Democratic mainstream, and were not markedly different from other vice-presidential candidates under consideration,” Glueck wrote, Shapiro “drew outsize attention on the subject, his supporters said, and some saw that focus as driven by antisemitism”—linking to Weisman’s piece about how the Walz choice might “alienate Jewish voters” as evidence.

    In a particularly bewildering piece, Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn (8/6/24) chided that Walz “does relatively little to define or redefine Ms. Harris”: “He won’t assuage concerns that she’s too far to the left,” Cohn lamented; “his selection doesn’t signal that Ms. Harris intends to govern as a moderate”—which is, of course, the New York Times‘ constant concern about Democrats. No matter, wrote Cohn—”there will be many more opportunities” for Harris to move to the right, “like a policy platform rollout and the Democratic convention.”

    ‘Didn’t dare cross the left’

    WSJ: Antisemites Target Josh Shapiro

    The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) came out and said what New York Times writers mostly insinuated: Shapiro was “vilified and maligned because he is Jewish.”

    The Murdoch press has painted Shapiro as a victim of antisemitism as well, although as outlets that practically equate the DNC with the USSR, it’s hard to see why they would care about the Harris campaign’s internal debates. “The attack on Mr. Shapiro is part of a far-left campaign to portray Jews as perpetrators or enablers of genocide,” Daniel Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (8/1/24). The New York Post editorial board (8/6/24) said that Shapiro was the “clear best choice” but Harris rejected him “plainly because she didn’t dare cross the left by tapping a Jew.”

    At FAIR (6/6/18, 8/26/20, 12/12/23), we’ve grown used to establishment media like the New York Times conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism as a way to keep the struggle for Palestinian rights on the political margins. But with the paper’s laments for the unchosen Shapiro—so parallel to the Murdoch media’s crocodile tears—the reach feels so extreme one wonders if even the authors themselves believe it.

    The Democratic Party boasts many Jewish lawmakers in both houses, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a sort of mascot of New York Jewishness rivaling Mel Brooks. Shapiro wouldn’t have even been the first Jew on a Democratic presidential ticket; the late Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, similarly observant but far to Shapiro’s political right, has that distinction. The suggestion that without Shapiro on the presidential ticket, the Democrats remain some kind of goyish social club is comical. (If we accept that spouses are unofficial parts of presidential tickets, Harris if elected will also give the White House its first Jewish resident.)

    Clearly, the Times does not believe that voters must simply accept Jewish candidates without looking at their records. It did not suggest that the party’s rejection of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 was rooted in disdain for his unabashed Brooklyn Jewishness. When New York City Comptroller Brad Lander challenges Mayor Eric Adams from the left in the 2025 city primaries, the paper is unlikely to suggest that voters who stick with the incumbent are Jew haters.

    It’s becoming clear that for the corporate media, it is OK to not support Jewish candidates if they support lifting wages, fighting climate change or addressing racial injustice. But at a time when concern for Palestinian lives has become so mainstream that being too pro-Israel can become a political liability, the New York Times wants Jewish politicians’ support for Israel to be a taboo topic.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Delta Airlines Forces Passenger to Remove T-Shirt in Anti-Palestine Move

    Since the onset of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in October 2023, there has been a dramatic rise in harassment, policing and discrimination against Palestinians and allies who publicly speak out in favor of a ceasefire. Louie Siegel, an anti-Zionist Jewish-American, experienced the suppression of anti-Zionist speech firsthand when, during a recent Delta Airlines flight from São Paulo to Chicago…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Italy’s Antisemitism Scandal Should Have Raised Alarms in US

     

    Reuters: Rome's Jews outraged after videos show antisemitism in Meloni's youth movement

    Reuters (6/27/24) noted that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party “traces its roots to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed in 1946 as a direct heir of Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement that ruled Italy for more than 20 years.”

    An antisemitism scandal has rocked one of Europe’s major far-right political leaders: Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy. It’s been major news in the European press. But the story is being mishandled by major US corporate media, and that fact says a lot about how poorly antisemitism is covered in the United States.

    Reuters (6/27/24) reported:

    A reporter from online newspaper Fanpage [6/14/24] infiltrated Gioventu Nazionale, Meloni’s rightist Brothers of Italy youth movement, and recorded videos in which members declared themselves fascists and shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil.”… The investigation also showed a Gioventu Nazionale member mocking Brothers of Italy senator Ester Mieli for her Jewish origin, and revealed chats on messaging platforms where militants took aim at ethnic minorities.

    Meloni’s political opponents used this footage against her (Guardian, 6/27/24). She eventually condemned the antisemites (Euronews, 6/29/24). Haaretz (6/30/24) said:

    This 12-minute video showed National Youth activists, including two senior figures, singing a celebratory song in honor of the disgraced dictator Benito Mussolini, chanting “Sieg Heil!” and glorifying the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei)—a neofascist terrorist group that was active in Italy in the late 1970s and early ’80s, committing over 100 murders.

    Neofascist roots

    Fanpage: The Meloni Youth: the investigative report that unveils the nostalgia for fascism showed by Giorgia Meloni’s rising stars

    Fanpage (6/14/24) led off its report on Italy’s National Youth by noting that Meloni refers to them as “marvelous young people,” and they are defined as “the soul and the driving force” of her party.
     

    This shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Italian politics. The nation’s small but vibrant Jewish population has been skeptical of Meloni’s ascendence and that of her party, Brothers of Italy. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (9/30/22) explained two years ago:

    Meloni’s first stop in politics was in the youth movement of the Italian Social Movement, known as MSI, a neofascist party founded in 1946 by people who had worked with Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader from 1922 to 1943. Brothers of Italy is closely tied to the group, even housing its office in the same building where MSI operated and using an identical logo, a tricolor flame.

    With Meloni at the helm of one of Europe’s biggest economies, she is not a minor player; in fact, at the last G7 conference, she stood out as a confident leader (AP, 10/18/23; Wall Street Journal, 6/13/24) over a flock of feeble, vulnerable centrists and conservatives.

    One of those was Rishi Sunak, who has since lost his job as British prime minister and Conservative Party leader (Guardian, 7/5/24). Another is President Joe Biden, who is being pressured to drop out of the US presidential race due to concerns regarding his cognitive health (New York Times, 6/28/24). And French President Emmanuel Macron has been weakened by the poor performance of his party in snap parliamentary elections (Reuters, 7/7/24).

    The summit took place after Meloni’s party increased its share of the popular vote in  the European Union election, and she is now “poised to play a critical role shaping the future direction of EU policy in Brussels” (Politico, 6/13/24).

    Late to the story—or absent

    NYT: Meloni Condemns Fascist Nostalgia Amid Scandal in Her Party’s Youth Wing

    The New York Times (7/2/24) led with Meloni “urg[ing] leaders of her political party on Tuesday to reject antisemitism, racism and nostalgia for totalitarian regimes.”

    The New York Times (6/11/24) has positively portrayed Meloni as a “critical player” as the host of the G7 conference, and has been upbeat about her rising stature generally. (Her anti-Russian politicking “sealed her credibility as someone who could play an influential role in the top tier of European leaders”—2/7/24.) The Times (7/2/24) came late to the Brother of Italy story , leading with the news of her public relations drive to denounce the racist content. The Washington Post, which also had previously normalized her as a European politician (6/6/24), covered the story in a similar fashion with AP copy (7/3/24).

    NPR missed the story. So did CNN. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board had said she was “governing with some success” (6/13/24), and whose news coverage has portrayed her as a pragmatist (6/13/24), wasn’t interested in  the scandal either.

    This lackluster coverage, which at best focused on Meloni’s self-interested damage control rather than the dark ideology at the center of her movement, is confounding. Western media have been rightfully fretting about the far right’s impressive showing in recent EU parliamentary elections (New York Times, 6/9/24). Meloni’s reputation as a strong leader among ailing centrist European leaders is bolstered by other far-right parties making impressive gains.

    All of these parties, known for their anti-immigration and anti-multicultural positions, also have tinges of right-wing antisemitism, including Britain’s Reform Party (Haaretz, 6/23/24), Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (Deutsche Welle, 8/5/23) and France’s National Rally (AP, 7/3/24). In the US, Donald Trump has been careful not to criticize the overt antisemites in the MAGA movement, including the “very fine people” who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville (Politico, 12/7/22). The Washington Post (10/17/22) noted that Trump has long employed antisemitic tropes in his rhetoric.

    A danger signal ignored

    NYT: Feeling Alone and Estranged, Many Jews at Harvard Wonder What’s Next

    The New York Times (12/16/23) is more concerned about the “antisemitism” of protesters who assert “that the war in Gaza was a genocide.”

    And so the Fanpage revelations should have been a blaring danger signal, as they were for the European press. The New York Times has been raising alarms (10/31/23, 12/16/23) about a rise of antisemitism since the October 7 attacks in Israel, painting the problem as one that plagues the left and the right. But as FAIR (12/12/23, 12/15/23) has talked about, corporate media are quick to cast legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitism to discredit pro-Palestine points of view, wrongfully equating opposition to genocide with the racist antisemitism of the right.

    Regardless of the reason for US corporate media’s oversight, the impact is clear. The press can talk about antisemitism more openly when they can attach it to human rights protesters, but are less eager to describe antisemitism as it actually is: a bigotry that is interwoven with the anti-Islamic and xenophobic platforms of the powerful far right.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Establishment Press Hails Big Money Crushing a Black Progressive

     

    Election Focus 2024A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

    Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

    Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

    Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

    That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

    ‘Veered too far left’

    WaPo: Jamaal Bowman was a Democratic Trump. Now he’s gone.

    Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

    The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

    Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

    The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

    Egregiously misleading

    NYT: Jamaal Bowman Deserved to Lose

    For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

    At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

    We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

    First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

    This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

    The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

    Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

    In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

    ‘Pendulum swinging back’

    NYT: Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats

    The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

    In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

    The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

    To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

    The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

    Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

    The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Does the video show a US lawmaker outraged over the Antisemitism Awareness Act?

    A video of an American legislator yelling in outrage emerged in social media posts that claim it shows the lawmaker was angry about the recent passage of the Antisemitism Awareness Act by the U.S. House of Representatives. 

    But the claim is false. The video, taken from 2012 footage, shows the-Illinois House of Representatives member and current Illinois Republican congressman Mike Bost criticizing a reform plan for social security.

    The video was shared on X by Chinese diplomat Zhang Heqing on June 8, 2024. 

    “It looks like he is angry,” Zhang said in the post. 

    The 44-second video shows a man dressed in a suit shouting in outrage at what appears to be a meeting of the U.S. House.

    “The U.S. putting out this act about the Jews is a shameful disgrace,” a superimposed caption in Chinese reads.  

    1 (8).png
    Chinese diplomat Zhang Heqing circulated a video claiming that a U.S. legislator lost his temper and publicly went off on the recent Antisemitism Awareness Act passed by the House of Representatives. (Screenshot/X)

    The House passed a bipartisan bill, Antisemitism Awareness Act, on May 1 to combat antisemitism as pro-Palestinian protests roil colleges across the U.S.

    The bill would mandate that the Education Department adopt the broad definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group, to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

    The group defines antisemitism as a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”

    It adds that “rhetorical and physical manifestations” of antisemitism include such things as calling for the killing or harming of Jews or holding Jews collectively responsible for actions taken by Israel.

    The video had previously been shared by other Chinese influencers on social media platforms such as Douyin, Weibo and X. 

    Some online users commented that even “U.S. lawmakers have grown fed up with U.S. support of Israel and the Jewish community” citing the video.

    But the claim is false.  

    Old video

    A reverse image search found the video published in a report by the American broadcaster CBS on May 30, 2012.

    “IL Rep. Mike Bost Is Furious Over Pension Reforms by Steve Lehocky on YouTube,” the caption of the video reads. 

    The report details the Democrat-led plan to overhaul the state pension system.

    2 (3).png
    Both the figures and scene from the footage of Bost in 2012 (top) matches the recent footage Chinese netizens purportedly claim shows a legislator’s outburst over the Antisemitism Awareness Act.  (Screenshots /CNN and X) 

    “A downstate lawmaker screamed, yelled and threw papers Tuesday, as he expressed frustration about the Democrat-led plan to overhaul the state pension system,” the report reads in part. 

    “One of those lawmakers is Rep. Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro), who launched into a tirade Tuesday as he complained about the amount of power Madigan wields.”

    Bost on the Antisemitism Awareness Act

    Bost did not speak at all during the near hour long House deliberation on  the Antisemitism Awareness Act broadcast by CSPAN on May 1. 

    The act eventually passed the House by a vote of 320 in favor, 91 against and 18 abstentions, with Bost officially recorded as voting for the act.

    While legislators from both parties openly opposed the bill, none of them expressed their disagreement in emotional language or exaggerated movements during the proceedings. 

    The act  awaits approval by the Senate before it can be sent to the president to be signed into law. 

    Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

    Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Censorship at a Jewish School Part of a Crisis for Free Expression

     

    Boiling Point: School censors story about LA Muslim teens and war

    Shalhevet school head David Block (Boiling Point, 6/2/24): “If our community can’t handle something, I do have to consider that.”

    The staff of the Boiling Point don’t consider themselves student journalists. They consider themselves journalists.

    The official paper of Shalhevet, a prestigious orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, is not a mere extra-curricular activity for the college-bound, but a living record of the larger community. And so the fact that the school is censoring the paper’s coverage of pro-Palestine viewpoints is an illustration of the nation’s current crisis of free speech and the free press as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza rages on.

    The Boiling Point (6/2/24) reported that the school administration had censored an article about Muslim perspectives on Gaza because it quoted a teenager who “said Israel was committing genocide and that she did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities.” The paper said:

    Head of school Rabbi David Block told faculty advisor Mrs. Joelle Keene to take down the story from all Boiling Point postings later that day.

    It was the first time the administration had ordered the paper to remove an active story. The story is also not published in today’s print edition.

    “Shalhevet’s principal ordered that the entire paper be taken out of circulation in what advisor Joelle Keene said was a striking change of pace,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6/11/24) reported. She told the wire service, “There have been difficult stories and difficult moments and conflicts and that sort of thing. We’ve always been able to work them out.”

    Justifications for censorship

    The administration’s justification for the censorship was twofold. The first reason for the censorship was that the pro-Palestine viewpoints were simply too hurtful for a community that was still in shock over the October 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas.

    This is, to be quite blunt, demeaning to the students and the community. I was not much older than these students during the 9/11 attacks, but I spent that day and days after that at my student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. While our reporters piled into a car to drive to New York City, I joined my fellow editorial board members—Jews, Arabs and many others—in navigating a future of war, attacks on civil liberties and anti-Islamic hate.

    And today, student journalists are no less important in this historical moment where students are standing up against the genocide in Gaza (USA Today, 5/2/24; AP, 5/2/24).

    The Boiling Point is hardly pro-Hamas. As one of its editors, Tali Liebenthal, said in response to this point, it was indeed painful for the community to hear anti-Israel opinions, but “I don’t think that the Boiling Point has any responsibility to shield our readers from that pain.” The Shalhevet students, in the tradition of Jewish inquiry, do certainly appear able to explore the tough and difficult subjects of their moment.

    But there’s a second, more banal reason for the censorship. Block told the Boiling Point, “My feeling is that this article would both give people the wrong impression about Shalhevet.” He added:

    It would have very serious implications for whether they’re going to consider sending the next generation of people who should be Shalhevet students to Shalhevet.

    Block is placing prospective parents’ sensitivities before truth and debate. He’s worried that families will see a quote in the paper they disagree with, decide the school is a Hamas hot house, and send their child for an education elsewhere. The suggestion is that the school’s enrollment numbers are more important, not just than freedom of the press, but than a central aspect of Jewishness: the pursuit of knowledge.

    Would Block block articles exploring why ultra-religious Jews like Satmars (Shtetl, 11/22/23) and Neturei Karta (Haaretz, 3/27/24) oppose Zionism for theological reasons? We should hope a school for Jewish scholarship would be wise to value discussions of deep ideas over fear of offending potential enrollees.

    Perverting ideals of openness

    Intercept: Columbia Law Review Refused to Take Down Article on Palestine, So Its Board of Directors Nuked the Whole Website

    Intercept (6/3/24): “After the editors [of the Columbia Law Review] declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.”

    The Boiling Point affair is indicative of a larger problem with a censorship that exploits the term “antisemitism” and a sensitivity to Jewish suffering to silence anything remotely critical of Israel’s far-right government. Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide, had his position as director at the Center of Genocide and Holocaust students at the University of Minnesota rescinded (MPR, 6/11/24) because he wrote that Israel’s intentions for its campaign in Gaza were genocidal (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23). The board of directors of the Columbia Law Review briefly took down the journal’s website in response to an article (5/24) published about the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians—after the piece had already been spiked by the Harvard Law Review (Intercept, 6/3/24).  The chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College was violently arrested during an anti-genocide protest (Jerusalem Post, 5/3/24).

    The 92nd Street Y, a kind of secular Jewish temple of arts and culture in New York City, encountered massive staff resignations (NPR, 10/24/23) after it canceled a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (London Review of Books, 10/18/23). The author of the American Jewish Committee’s definition of antisemitism admits that his work is being used to crush free speech (Guardian, 12/13/19; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/27/24).

    These are prominent institutions that are meant to be pillars of openness and discourse in a free society, yet that are perverting themselves in order not to offend donors, government officials and sycophantic newspaper columnists. And the victims of this kind of censorship are Jews and non-Jews alike.

    From the highest universities down to high schools like Shalhevet, administrators are cloaking their worlds in darkness. The journalists at the Boiling Point are part of a resistance keeping free speech and expression alive in the United States.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Talking to a purged Jewish person, Lisa Nandy says ‘we make no apology for expelling antisemites’

    On the BBC‘s Politics North West show, the Labour Party’s shadow minister for international development Lisa Nandy said:

    We make absolutely no apology for expelling antisemites from the Labour Party

    She was talking to Jo Bird, the Green Party candidate for Birkenhead. Bird replied:

    Are you calling me an antisemite?

    Nandy did not clarify.

    Jo Bird: encapsulating the Labour purge of Jewish members

    Bird is Jewish and Keir Starmer’s party expelled her in November 2021 for speaking at a Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) meeting in 2018.

    LAW was founded in October 2017 to oppose the weaponisation of antisemitism against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. Its sponsors include Jewish academic and author Noam Chomsky.

    In 2018, research from the Media Reform Coalition found that mainstream media coverage of Labour and antisemitism to be a “disinformation paradigm”.

    Bird is one of many Jewish people to face expulsion for supporting left-wing groups that Starmer arbitrarily banned. Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) has found that the party is almost 13 times more likely to expel a Jewish person for backing a proscribed group than other members.

    JVL also said that Labour is six times more likely to investigate Jewish members for antisemitism than other members. In a letter JVL sent to Labour’s general secretary, the group wrote:

    We invite you to acknowledge that the Party is in breach of the Equality Act 2010 by discriminating unlawfully against its Jewish members and unlawfully harassing them

    When Labour expelled Bird in November 2021, she condemned the “retrospective punishment” because Starmer didn’t ban the group until July 2021. Many people faced similar treatment. Martin Forde KC, who investigated racism in Labour, said:

    It just seemed to us to be concerning that if you’d attended such a meeting or expressed support in social media prior to the organisation being proscribed, that your historical interaction could be used as a current basis for expulsion.

    Lisa Nandy: defending a war crime

    On the BBC, Lisa Nandy also claimed:

    I have stood up for the Palestinian cause for over a decade

    But in October 2023, Victoria Derbyshire questioned Nandy on Israel cutting off electricity and water supplies for Palestinian people in Gaza. Nandy said that “Israel has the right to self defence”. She then said it’s a “very complex, difficult situation”.

    International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan stated Israel cutting off water and electricity is a war crime.

    In Khan’s statement requesting arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, he said the intensified siege was part of the “collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza”.

    So it’s clear Nandy’s apparent weaponisation of antisemitism is to divert attention from her support of war crimes. We must end UK complicity in the genocide.

    Featured image via Liverpool Riverside Left – X

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Corporate Media Push Conspiracy Theories to Discredit Student Protesters

     

    Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”

    Morning Joe: Hillary Clinton on the College Campus Protests

    Joe Scarborough and Hillary Clinton on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe (5/9/24) to talk about “misinformation,” agreeing that student protesters are “extremists…funded by Qatar.”

    MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:

    I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.

    Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”

    Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”

    Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding  universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.

    ‘Mr. Putin’s message’

    CNN: Pelosi suggests some pro-Palestinian protesters are connected to Russia

    Nancy Pelosi, interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN (1/28/24), accused protesters of being “connected to Russia” because “to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”

    House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:

    And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.

    CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”

    Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.

    Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”

    The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”

    In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to  amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.

    The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”

    ‘Professional outside agitators’

    CNN: Police in Riot Gear Arrest Students at University of Texas Austin

    ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN (4/29/24): “There’s no rule that says the school needs to tolerate students or, again, outside activists dressing like they’re in Al Qaeda.”

    Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.

    New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).

    On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).

    CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”

    CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”

    Fox: Trump condemns 'brainwashed' anti-Israel mob as NYPD moves in, dings Dems: 'Where is Schumer?'

    “I really believe they are brainwashed,” Donald Trump (Fox News, 4/30/24) said of student protesters.

    Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”

    It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.

    “If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”

    That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey  headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.

    Tents situation

    Good Day NY: Protests Grow on Columbia University Campus

    NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry (Fox 5 New York, 4/23/24): “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.”

    One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”

    “Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.

    That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.

    Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”

    The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic  cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?

    ‘Soros paying student radicals’

    Fox: Anti-Israel protests nationwide fueled by left-wing groups backed by Soros, dark money

    Fox News (4/26/24): “Progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country…are associated with groups tied to far-left groups with radical associations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”

    And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”

    The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”

    On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:

    I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.

    “It looked pretty orchestrated to me,” NewsNation host Blake Burman agreed.

    Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.

    Featured image: New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Once again, Jeremy Corbyn and his team are vindicated – and Starmer exposed as a petulant careerist

    On Thursday 6 June, Taj Ali broke the news on X that the Labour Party is discontinuing its legal claims against Jeremy Corbyn’s ex-staffers.

    In April 2020, a document was leaked which exposed thousands of racist messages, emails, and internal documents. It also revealed how right-wing senior staffers ran a coup against Corbyn, the leader of the party at the time. Party officials then silenced, excluded, and expelled its own left-wing members in an attempt to undermine Corbyn’s attempt at becoming prime minister. 

    As the Canary’s Ed Sykes wrote back in 2020, the report was:

    a particularly significant revelation in light of the years-long smear campaign which sought to convince British voters that Corbyn and his supporters were somehow raving antisemites.

    Nine people then started legal action against Labour, claiming they had breached their data after reporting antisemitism.

    Labour didn’t want to take responsibility or presumably pay damages. So, they named five ex-Corbyn staffers who had put the report together. In September last year, the nine dropped the legal case. However, Labour did not drop its case, perhaps aiming to get back some of the costs:

    All five had condemned the leaking of the report. Funnily enough, three separate reports took place to try and find the person responsible, but no one was able. 

    Finally on 6 June, Labour dropped the legal case: 

    Labour: wasted election funds?

    According to reports from the BBC, the party had already spent £1.5m by October last year, and planned to spend nearly £900k more. 

    Since the election was announced, the Labour Party has been desperately emailing members and ex-members, begging for general election donations. Anyone would think it was strapped for cash:

    So far on the campaign trail, Starmer wants us to believe we should trust him more than Sunak with our money. Should we be taking this legal case as an example of what is to come?

    Members and ex-members are understandably angry at the apparent misuse of membership fees. Other people pointed out how Labour could have used that money on the campaign trail. It could have benefitted candidates such as Faiza Shaheen or Diane Abbott.

    Recently, Labour has made it obvious that it isn’t the party for minorities. That is ironic when in the background they were still battling the fallout of the leak which exposed thousands of racist messages. Some of which staffers had aimed at Diane Abbott:

    Corbyn and his team vindicated (again)

    Labour has consistently weaponised racism against Abbott and other potential election candidates. It is clear that Starmer – supposedly one of our leading legal minds – only follows up on racism allegations when those on the political right stand to benefit from it.

    The whole legal case was a colossal waste of time. It clearly hasn’t addressed racism within the party and if anything, has only served to cement it. Moreover, it was clearly an attempt to the Labour right to further smear Corbyn and his team’s legacy.

    But it seems that now an election is around the corner, Labour wanted to bury this hatchet. Had it not gone the party’s way, it really could have really messed up its chances.

    Feature image via Jeremy Corbyn/Wikimedia

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • GOP Antisemitism Hearing Is “Offensive and Dangerous,” Jewish Organizers Say

    As U.S. House Republicans held yet another hearing about antisemitism and higher education on Thursday, Jewish students and advocacy groups aimed to set the record straight on the threats they face and the largely peaceful protests against genocide. “This hearing has nothing to do with keeping Jewish students on campus safe, and is solely designed as part of a broader campaign to silence anti-war…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Reporting on Influence of Pro-Israel Funders Is Not Antisemitic

    Washington Post article

    After pro-Israel billionaires and millionaires met with Eric Adams, one attendee summarized “items ‘discussed today,’ including donating to Adams, using group members’ ‘leverage’ to help persuade Columbia’s president to let New York police back on campus, and paying for ‘investigative efforts’ to assist the city.” (Washington Post, 5/16/24)

    An exposé by the Washington Post (5/16/24) showed the degree to which wealthy pro-Israel businesspeople coordinated with each other to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to take drastic action against college campus protests against the genocide of Palestinians.

    It’s a remarkable piece of reporting, by Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, that points to a pervasive problem in American politics: that the wealthy enjoy outsized influence with the political class, while the rest of us drift in the wind. 

    The story is based on transcripts of a WhatsApp groupchat called “Israel Current Events,” whose participants included “billionaires and business titans.” One message by a billionaire’s staffer “told the others the goal of the group was to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel,” the Post reported. A person identified only as “a staffer” told the group, “While Israel worked to ‘win the physical war,’ the chat group’s members would ‘help win the war’ of US public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.”

    The article reported that the chats revealed collaboration with Adams:

    “He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member [Joseph] Sitt, founder of the retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s OK if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”

    The piece revealed that groupchat members, aware that “Columbia had to grant Adams permission before he could send city police to the campus,” strategized about how to apply the group’s “leverage” to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, including contacting the university’s board of trustees.

    ‘An all-too-familiar trope’

    New York Post editorial

    The New York Post (5/17/24)—which regularly accuses George Soros of being the puppet master behind all progressive causes—attacked the Washington Post: “Intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”

    Needless to say, City Hall wasn’t too happy about the piece. One of the mayor’s deputies, Fabien Levy, quickly responded on Twitter (5/16/24) that “the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all-too-familiar antisemitic trope.” 

    His multi-post thread concluded: 

    @WashingtonPost & others can make editorial decisions to disagree with the decisions by universities to ask the NYPD to clear unlawful encampments on campuses, but saying Jews “wielded their money and power in an effort to shape American views” is offensive on so many levels.

    The Washington Post, of course, did not report that “Jews” had “wielded their money and power”—but that “some prominent individuals” had, distinguished not by religion or ethnicity, but by their politics.

    The mayor himself called the story “antisemitic in its core” (Good Day New York, 5/20/24) and doubled down on this point when speaking to reporters (New York Post, 5/21/24). The Anti-Defamation League (Twitter, 5/20/24) said that the Washington Post should be 

    ashamed of publishing an article that unabashedly (and almost entirely on anonymous sources) plays into antisemitic tropes by inferring a secret cabal of Jews is using wealth & power to influence governments, the media, the business world & academia.

    The Adams administration’s effort to redirect scrutiny away from the latest credible charge of coziness with wealthy donors found a friendly audience in right-wing media. Fox News (5/17/24) gave Levy’s claims headline status, and the New York Post editorial board (5/17/24) said that the Adams administration “smells a whiff of antisemitism in the WaPo report,” because “intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”

    Yes, that’s the same New York Post that obsessively ties every political cause to the left of Emperor Palpatine to the Jewish philanthropist George Soros (e.g., 8/1/22, 1/22/23, 1/25/23, 7/24/23, 12/9/23, 4/26/24, 4/26/24). It is also interesting to note that two Rupert Murdoch outlets, thought to be Republican stalwarts, are once again acting as in-kind public relations agents for a Democratic mayor, a testament to Adams’ right-wing agenda—the New York Post endorsed him (5/20/21) and continues to cheerlead for him (1/27/24) as he approaches the end of his first term. For the Murdoch empire, politics (including shielding Israel) sometimes comes before party. 

    ABC article

    ABC (4/24/24) reported that at Passover Seders celebrated in campus antiwar encampments, “some set aside an empty seat at the Seder table for hostages abducted from Israel on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise terror attack. Others put an olive on the Seder plate to recognize solidarity with Palestinians.”

    A tired accusation

    The accusation that the student protest movement against the genocide of Palestinians is “antisemitic” has become more and more tired. Many Jews are mobilizing in these protests (ABC, 4/24/24). As a result, many Jewish protesters face state violence (Al Jazeera, 5/3/24) and censorship (FAIR.org, 12/15/23) for speaking out against the Israeli military. Yet the Adams administration, Fox and the New York Post continue to hurl the insult, this time at the Washington Post, signaling that they have no more honest way to defend the behavior exposed by the Post.

    It would be just as ridiculous to claim that Jeff Sharlet’s reporting (Washington Post, 8/16/19) on the influence of Christian lobbying in Washington is anti-Christian, or investigations into the millions of dollars Saudi Arabia spends in the US to sanitize its image (Guardian, 12/22/22) are anti-Muslim. Federal investigators are probing Adams’ financial relationship with Turkey (Politico, 12/22/23; New York Times, 5/20/24), and there’s been no serious discourse that the scrutiny is somehow anti-Muslim. Is reporting on the growing influence of the Indian BJP and the Indian nationalist government in Washington (Intercept, 3/16/20; Jacobin, 3/4/23) anti-Hindu?

    When we talk about the Israel lobby, we don’t even necessarily mean Jewish advocates; that lobby consists heavily of right-wing evangelical Christians (Jerusalem Post, 1/27/24). Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who announced he wouldn’t hire Harvard grads who signed a letter critical of Israel (New York Post, 10/16/23), is Presbyterian. The arms industry supports Israel as well, strictly from the profit potential of protracted violence in the Middle East (Reuters, 10/16/23).

    Establishment attacks on outlets that expose corruption are evidence of good journalism (FAIR.org, 6/17/21, 1/12/24,  2/2/24). Such attacks are meant to stifle the press, and keep them from being a check on power. In this case, they are meant to shut down dissent against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 

    False charges of antisemitism have been an effective tool for the right in the past (FAIR.org, 8/26/20). The good news is that this may be starting to change.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Zionism Will Never Be a Solution to Antisemitism

    Over seven months since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel’s defenders are increasingly desperate to delegitimize the growing movement for justice in Palestine, especially on college campuses. When anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews are targeted by their rhetoric, we often notice something surprising — much of the slander directed at us is deeply antisemitic. MAGA politicians…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Israel Begins “Final Phase” of Genocide, Biden Slams Pro-Palestine Protests

    As Israel embarked on the first steps of its long-promised invasion of Rafah, Biden delivered a chilling speech scapegoating Hamas militants and pro-Palestine protesters for antisemitism in the U.S. on Tuesday, vowing a crackdown on demonstrators seeking to end Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. During remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance ceremony…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jewish Prof Body-Slammed by Police Tells Biden to Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

    Gaza solidarity protests continue at college campuses across the nation — as does the police crackdown. This comes as more than 50 chapters of the American Association of University Professors have issued a statement condemning the violent arrests by police at campus protests. At Dartmouth College last week, police body-slammed professor and former chair of Jewish studies Annelise Orleck to the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Former NUS president settles with union over antisemitism claims

    Shaima Dallali, ousted as NUS president in 2022, said to have accepted ‘substantial’ settlement before tribunal

    A former president of the National Union of Students is said to have accepted a “substantial” settlement to end her legal action against the union following her dismissal over allegations of antisemitism.

    Shaima Dallali was ousted as NUS UK president in November 2022 after an investigation claimed she had made “significant breaches” of the union’s antisemitism policies. But shortly before Dallali’s legal challenge was to be heard by an employment tribunal, the NUS and Dallali’s lawyers said a settlement had been agreed.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • “Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism”: Police “Body-Slam” Jewish Dartmouth Prof. at Campus Gaza Protest


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism”: Police “Body-Slam” Jewish Dartmouth Prof. at Campus Gaza Protest

    Seg3 split guest police

    Gaza solidarity protests continue at college campuses across the nation — as does the police crackdown. This comes as more than 50 chapters of the American Association of University Professors have issued a statement condemning the violent arrests by police at campus protests. At Dartmouth College last week, police body-slammed professor and former chair of Jewish studies Annelise Orleck to the ground as she tried to protect her students. She was charged with criminal trespass and temporarily banned from portions of Dartmouth’s campus. She joins us to describe her ordeal and respond to claims conflating the protests’ anti-Zionist message with antisemitism. “People have to be able to talk about Palestine without being attacked by police,” says Orleck, who commends the students leading protests around the country. “Their bravery is tremendous and is inspiring. And they really feel like this is the moral issue of their time, that there’s a genocide going on and that they can’t ignore it.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • To Confront Antisemitism, Stand With the Oppressed, Not Today’s Pharaohs

    In a satirical Instagram post, musical theater composer Daniel Maté lamented that Jewish dissenters’ efforts to “increase antisemitism” by denouncing Israel’s abuses of Palestinians were “not really working.” Rather, he joked, they were sparking favorable impressions of Jews from the broader pro-Palestine solidarity movement. He then facetiously suggested a new tactic — to find Jewish billionaires…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • House Passes Bill That Defines Criticism of Israel as “Antisemitism”

    House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve legislation directing the U.S. Department of Education to consider a dubious definition of antisemitism, despite warnings from Jewish-led groups that the measure speciously conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry against Jewish people. House members approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act — bipartisan…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism: Jewish students are at the forefront of Palestine protests #Columbia


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israeli Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov on Campus Protests, Weaponized Antisemitism, Silencing Dissent


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’: CounterSpin interview with Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine

    Janine Jackson interviewed Sam, representative from National Students for Justice in Palestine, for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Janine Jackson: There is a long and growing list of US college campuses where encampments and other forms of protests are going on, in efforts to get college administrations to divest their deep and powerful resources from weapons manufacturers, and other ways and means of enabling Israel’s war on Palestinians, assaults that have killed some 34,000 people just since the Hamas attack of October 7.

    One key group on campuses has been SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s not a new, hastily formed group; they’ve been around and on the ground for decades.

    We’re joined now by Sam, a representative of National Students for Justice in Palestine. Welcome to CounterSpin.

    Sam: Thank you for having me.

    Middle East Eye: 'Columbia is making us homeless': Students evicted for hosting Palestinian event

    Middle East Eye (4/8/24)

    JJ: I can only imagine what a time this is for you, but certainly a time when the need for your group is crystal clear. Individuals who want to speak up about the genocide in Palestine are helped by the knowledge that there are other people with them, behind them, but also that there are organizations that exist to support them and their right to speak out. I wonder, is that maybe especially true for students, whose rights exist on paper, but are not always acknowledged in reality?

    S: Yes and no. I think a lot of people definitely want to support students, because what we’re doing is very visible, and also I think people are more willing to assume good faith from 20-year-olds. At the same time, also, free speech on college campuses, especially private campuses, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. So if you’re on a campus, that means that it is sometimes harder to speak out, especially because we’re seeing students getting suspended, and when they get suspended, they get banned from campus, they get evicted from their student housing, sometimes they lose access to healthcare. And, basically, the schools control a lot more of students’ lives than any institution does for adults in the workforce, for example.

    JJ: Right. So what are you doing day to day? You’re at National SJP, and folks should know that there are hundreds of entities on campuses, but what are you doing? How do you see your job right now?

    S: SJP is a network of chapters that work together. It’s not like they’re branches, where we are giving them orders; they have full autonomy to do what they want within this network.

    So what we’re doing is what we’ve been trying to do for our entire existence, which is act as a hub, act as a resource center, provide resources to students, connect them with each other, offer advice, offer financial support when we can. One thing we’re really trying to do is pull everything together, basically present a consistent narrative to the public around this movement.

    NYT: Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic?

    New York Times (4/29/24)

    JJ: Speaking of narrative, the claim that anyone voicing anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian ideas is antisemitic is apparently convincing for some people whose view of the world comes through the TV or the newspaper. But it’s an idea that is blown apart by any visit to a student protest. It’s just not a true thing to say. And I wonder what you would say about narratives. It’s obviously about work, supporting people, but on the narrative space, what are you trying to shift?

    S: I mean, I’m Jewish. I’m fairly observant. I was at a Seder last night. When people say the pro-Palestinian movement is antisemitic, they’re lying. I’m just flat-out saying I think a lot of people, on some level, know that this isn’t about Jews. This isn’t about Judaism. It’s about the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in our people’s name. And if you support it, that is going to lead people to make a bunch of bad inferences about you, because you’re vocally supporting a genocide.

    This weaponization is meant to shift focus away from Gaza, away from Palestine, the people who are being massacred, the people whose bodies they found in a mass grave at a hospital yesterday. The point is to distract from the fact that there is no moral case to defend what Israel was doing. So the only thing that Zionists have going for them is just smears, attacking the movement, tone-policing, demanding we take stances that they’re never asked to take. No one ever asks pro-Israel protestors, “Do you condemn the Israeli government,” because Israel is seen as a legitimate entity.

    First of all, I want to clarify, this is about Palestine. I don’t want to get too far into talking about how the genocide, the Zionist backlash to the movement, affects me as a Jewish person, because I have a roof over my head. There’s not going to be a bomb dropping into my home.

    The narrative that we’re really trying to put out is this, what we’re calling the Popular University for Gaza, and it’s an overarching campaign narrative over this. Basically, the idea is that everything that’s happening is laying bare the fact that universities do not care about their students, or their staff, or their faculty, who are the people who make the university a university, and not just an investment firm. They care about their investments and profit and their reputation and, essentially, managing social change.

    Columbia University Press Blog: Jon N. Hale On The Mississippi Freedom Schools—An Ongoing Lesson in Justice Through Education

    Columbia University Press Blog (2/27/19)

    So what we’re doing is, as students, making encampments, taking up space on their campuses. And a crucial part of these encampments is the programming in them. It’s drawing on the traditions of Freedom Schools in the ’60s and in the South, and also the Popular University for Palestine, which was a movement, I think it’s still ongoing, in Palestine, basically educators teaching for liberation, teaching about the history of Palestinian figures, about resistance, about colonialism.

    But the idea is that students are inserting themselves, forcibly disrupting the university’s normal business; and threatening the university’s reputation is a big part of it, and just rejecting their legitimacy, establishing the Popular University for teaching, where scholarship is done for the benefit of the people, not for preserving hegemony.

    With this whole thing, we’re trying to emphasize, basically, that our universities, they have built all these reputations and all these super great things about them, but they don’t care about the people in them. So we’re going to take the structures that make up them, which are the people within them, and essentially turn them toward liberation, and against imperialism, against the ruling class.

    Reuters: Columbia threatens to suspend pro-Palestinian protesters after talks stall

    Reuters (4/29/24)

    JJ: Well, thank you very much. I want to say it’s very refreshing, and refreshing is not enough. A lot of folks are drawing inspiration from hearing people say, “The New York Times is saying I’m antisemitic. Maybe I should shut up, you know? Media are saying I’m disruptive. Oh, maybe I should quiet down.” I don’t see any evidence of shutting up or quieting down, despite, really, the full narrative power, along with other kinds of power, being brought against protesters. It doesn’t seem to be shutting people up.

    S: No, because that’s the thing, is students have had enough, students are perfectly willing now to risk suspension, risk expulsion, because they know that, essentially, the university’s prestige has been shattered. Even me, I’m currently in school, I’m a grad student. I’ve realized, so far I’ve been OK, but even if I did get expelled, or forced to drop out of my program, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what people in Palestine are going through. We are willing to sacrifice our futures in a system that increasingly doesn’t give us a future anyway. I think that’s another big part of it, is the feeling that, basically, even if you get a degree, you’re still going to be living precariously for a decade.

    And another thing is, also, that today’s college seniors graduated from high school in the spring of 2020. They never really had a normal college experience. Their freshman year was online, so they never developed the bonds with that university, traditional attachment to the university. And also, the universities, the way they handled Covid generally has been terrible, and just seeing them completely disregard their students during the pandemic, I think, has really radicalized a lot of students. Basically, they’re willing to defy the institution.

    This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine. It’s not about standing with Columbia students. They have repeatedly asked: Don’t center them; center Gaza. And, basically, we reject the university system as the arbiter of our futures, the arbiter of right and wrong. And we’re going to make our own learning spaces until they listen to us and stop investing our tuition dollars in genocide.

    So yeah, free Palestine.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sam from Students for Justice in Palestine, NationalSJP.org. Thank you so much, Sam, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    S: Yeah, thanks for having me.

     

    The post ‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Sanders Sharply Rebukes Netanyahu’s Claim That Campus Protests Are Antisemitic

    Jewish U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a scathing statement Thursday pushing back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s characterization of burgeoning protests on American university campuses as “antisemitic,” declaring, “It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.” “No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Holocaust survivors expose pro-Israel lobbyist Gideon Falter’s smearing of pro-Palestine protestors

    Speaking to BBC News, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) chief Gideon Falter branded people protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine “lawless mobs”.

    And in a statement, Gideon Falter appeared to suggest protestors and those opposed to Israel’s conduct were “racists, extremists, and terrorist sympathisers”. He’s also said that “central London is a ‘no-go zone’ for Jews”.

    But a group of Holocaust survivors challenged such an account:

    Our group was ‘openly Jewish’ in that we all wore placards saying that, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, we oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    Every major pro-Palestine demonstration in London has included a large Jewish bloc which has received nothing but support and warmth from their fellow demonstrators.

    The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And Israel has now killed over 14,500 children.

    CAA openly equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism on its website. It brands former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as antisemitic for part of a clarification he attempted to issue to the party’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

    Specifically, CAA said the following amendment was antisemitic:

    It cannot be considered racist to treat Israel like any other state or assess its conduct against the standards of international law. Nor should it be regarded as antisemitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact, or to support another settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

    In 1948 Israel established itself through colonising 78% of Palestine. It has occupied the rest of the nation since 1967, as well as Syria’s Golan Heights.

    Corbyn sought to protect the right of free speech on colonisation, which the IHRA text questioned.

    A parliamentary report in 2015, meanwhile, stated:

    it is important that the (CAA) leadership do not conflate concerns about activity legitimately protesting Israel’s actions with antisemitism, as we have seen has been the case on some occasions

    A Met officer earlier in April prevented CAA chief Gideon Falter from moving through the anti-genocide and anti-occupation crowd at a London protest because he looked “openly Jewish”.

    The notion is bizarre given openly Jewish people attend the marches consistently. The Black Jewish Alliance, part of the Jewish bloc at the London protests, has described the demonstrators as part of an “eclectic and diverse movement of concerned citizens”.

    Israel’s apologists would rather smear people than politically engage in constructive discourse. We must uphold freedom of expression over colonialism in the face of those who want to silence us.

    Featured image via Sky News – YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israeli Director of “No Other Land” Slams Claims of Antisemitism over Apartheid Comment at Berlinale


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Scholars Should Be Able to Speak Out Against Genocide Without Fear of Punishment

    Academia has always been a political battleground. In recent years, those battles have been fought over issues of free speech, academic freedom and racial justice. As the world enters the sixth month of Israel’s current assault on the Palestinian people, scholars who advocate for Palestinian liberation, human rights and decolonization continue to find themselves in the crosshairs of right-wing…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Paul Mason smears audience member who calls out pro-Israel lobby partnership with Labour

    Commentator Paul Mason, who is trying to become a Labour MP, slandered an audience member as antisemitic during a Q&A discussion at an event entitled ‘Is it worth voting Labour in 2024?’

    The audience member said:

    I can’t believe that there hasn’t been any mention here of the Labour Files, like you know the way that Jeremy Corbyn was outed and obliterated through the media because of Keir Starmer and his Israeli sponsors and the fact that so many in the Labour Party are supported and funded by Israel. How can anyone even consider voting Labour, they don’t stand for the people.

    Israeli lobby – close ties with Starmer’s Labour

    The audience member’s comment is grounded in evidence.

    The Labour Files – an investigation by Al Jazeera – documented Israel putting up a £1m bounty for insiders to sabotage former anti-imperialist and left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

    The undercover work also revealed that Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) works “really closely” with the Israeli embassy. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves is an LFI vice chair.

    Pro-Israel lobbyists, meanwhile, have funded two fifths of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet, including Starmer himself.

    On top of this, the mainstream media has been complicit in the smear campaign that democratic movements are antisemitic. A Media Reform Coalition case study found coverage of Corbyn’s Labour and antisemitism to be a “disinformation paradigm”.

    In addition, Starmer helped secure Corbyn’s 2019 electoral defeat through pushing a re-run of the Brexit referendum, a policy elites used to guarantee Corbyn’s Labour lost.

    In response at the event in Kilburn, Paul Mason said:

    See, why didn’t you just say Jew? Why didn’t you just say Jew? Because…why didn’t you just say “He’s a Jewish agent”? Why didn’t you just say it because that’s what you mean isn’t it. And I’ll say to you, anybody in this room who wants to be part of a left where you go around saying ‘Starmer’s an Israeli agent’ if you want to do that, fine

    Mason’s credibility was brought into question in 2022 when leaked emails revealed him plotting with an intelligence contractor to take down independent media sites.

    Paul Mason’s “unhinged response”

    After the event, Paul Mason misrepresented what the audience member said to hundreds of thousands of followers. And on social media, people called him out:

    Others pointed out that Mason equating pro-Israel with ‘Jewish’ is itself antisemitic, because it is holding Jewish people collectively responsible for Israel’s actions:

    Mason went on to claim that Starmer’s Labour is “anti-racist”, despite its support for Israel’s genocidal and colonial assault against Palestinian people. Israel has now killed over 32,000 Palestinians including 13,000 children in under six months. The state has displaced 85% of the population of Gaza.

    Moreover, his claims of Starmer’s party being “anti-racist” are at odds with Martin Forde KC. The author of the notorious Forde Report claimed in 2023 that:

    Anti-black racism and Islamophobia is not taken as seriously as antisemitism within the Labour party, that’s the perception that has come through [from his report]… My slight anxiety is that in terms of hierarchy, and genuine underlying concerns about wider racial issues, it’s not in my view a sufficient response to say that was then, this is now.

    Mason has been caught trying to suppress discussion that exposes the UK political establishment through bogus antisemitism allegations. The commentator becoming an MP is the opposite of what we need.

    Featured image via Penguin Books UK- YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities

    As worldwide protest escalates over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, academic freedom and free speech are under all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from university administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but now directly from the highest levels of the Israeli state. In a story that has been largely ignored in the Western press, the Israeli news website…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.