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ANTI-SEMITISM

Democrats Go All In On Killing Jews What the support for Mahmoud Khalil, Hasan Piker and Rasha Alawieh really shows. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrats-go-all-in-on-killing-jews/

A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.

Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck. Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.

The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, “October 7th was Not ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Unfortunate’—It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist” and hailed the “moral, military, and political victory of the Operation”. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as “authoritarian” now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews.

Now, Democrats rallied once more in support of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter, traveling to America on a visa who was refused entry into the United States.

British police are letting pro-Palestine vandals run riot An activist who destroyed a historic painting of Lord Balfour has faced zero repercussions.Nicole Lampert

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/17/british-police-are-letting-pro-palestine-vandals-run-riot/

This time last year, a female pro-Palestine activist took a blade and a can of red spray paint to the 100-year-old painting of Lord Balfour in Trinity College, Cambridge. The perpetrator targeted the painting because Balfour was a signatory of the Balfour Declaration – the British Empire’s 1917 recognition of the aim to establish a Jewish state.

The crime was filmed and posted online for all to see. The perpetrator had a distinctive hairstyle (two plaits), as well as what looked like a £1,400 Mulberry backpack – something your average criminal usually doesn’t sport. She was also very clearly part of an outfit called Palestine Action, which claimed responsibility for the attack. With just a tiny bit of police work and some political will, uncovering the identity of the perpetrator would not have been a monumental task. And yet, a year after the historic painting was destroyed, Cambridgeshire Police have ended their ‘investigation’. They said only that they hoped new information may one day come to light.

Palestine Action seems to attack anything to do with Israel – including charities, banks, arms factories and even a bust of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. The group was founded in the UK in 2020 by Huda Ammori and serial activist Richard Barnard. A recent Sunday Times investigation found that, since then, it has claimed responsibility for 356 direct actions. It has ram-raided factories with vans, broken into offices and smashed up equipment.

Palestine Action has vowed to continue its violent behaviour. Just this week, three activists occupied part of the Allianz offices in central London and covered the windows in red paint. They scaled the building to unfurl a banner demanding that Allianz ‘drop Elbit’, an Israel-based defence contractor, as an insurance customer. Police stood around for hours, apparently helpless to do anything, until the protesters were finally brought down and arrested.

The Israeli Jew kidnapped by British jihadi thugs The horrific ordeal suffered by Itay Kashti reveals a sickness at the heart of our society. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/17/the-israeli-jew-kidnapped-by-british-jihadi-thugs/

‘My own personal October 7.’ That is how Itay Kashti describes his violent ordeal at the hands of three Jew-hating kidnappers in Wales last year. In a crowded field, Kashti’s kidnapping is easily among the most chilling acts of anti-Semitic violence we’ve seen perpetrated on these isles since Hamas’s pogrom in Israel 18 months ago.

This grotesque tale begins last August. Kashti, an Israeli Jewish music producer based in London, received an email from a man claiming to be a Polydor Records executive, inviting him to a songwriting retreat in Carmarthenshire. Kashti did a bit of due diligence, even speaking to the organisers, but didn’t notice anything unusual. An Airbnb was booked for him, along with a taxi to drive him there from his London home.

When he arrived at the rural cottage, he was jumped by three men wearing rubber masks and armed with an imitation pistol. The cabbie, who had helped Kashti in with his bags, was also attacked but managed to run away and call the police. Kashti, meanwhile, was handcuffed to a radiator, beaten and bloodied. Thankfully, his kidnappers’ amateurishness would save his life. They left him alone, and Kashti noticed he was chained to an unconnected pipe. He slipped free, found his phone and escaped into the shrubbery outside. He called his wife, and then the cops, who descended on the cottage and apprehended his tormentors.

Last week, the kidnappers were sentenced to eight years apiece at Swansea Crown Court. During their trial, the full, calculated horror of what had taken place was unfurled. Faiz Shah, 23, Mohammad Comrie, 23, and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, were trying to extort money.

Columbia Now Faces an Expensive Day of Reckoning A cost to the Jew-haters and brownshirts. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/columbia-now-faces-an-expensive-day-of-reckoning/

On many American campuses, antisemitic nitwits have ever since the beginning of the war in Gaza storm-trooped around, calling for the disappearance of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), expressing a wish for homicidal violence against Jews (“Intifada Forever”), and accusing the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” (“Stop the Genocide”). The worst of these offenders have been the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University, who have created that awful mess — physical and moral — on Morningside Heights, whom Columbia’s administrators have until now been treated with kid gloves, creating an environment where anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior goes largely unpunished.

Now the Trump administration wants Columbia’s tolerance for antisemitism to be investigated. Columbia, after all, receives $5 billion from federal contracts and grants, and that money which be at risk if Columbia is weighed and found wanting in its failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from the antisemitic bullyboys and brownshirts who threaten them, harass them, surround and hold some of them prisoner, while attacking others, and interrupt, in order to shut down, the classes taught by Israeli and Jewish professors. More on the Trump administration’s investigation — by three different federal agencies — of Columbia, and the possible action by the government to be taken against the university, can be found here: “Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, March 4, 2025:

The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.

Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.

How Trump’s Anti-Semitism Crackdown Has Already Changed Education by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/how-trumps-anti-semitism-crackdown-has-already-changed-education/

The Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student active in the anti-Zionist tentifada movement, is getting most of the attention regarding the president’s fight against campus anti-Semitism. That’s understandable—put a human face on something and it becomes a lone streetlight around which every media moth will flutter.

But that attention should not crowd out coverage of the fact that university administrative culture is already changing in significant ways thanks to the White House’s focus on combating campus anti-Semitism. Khalil’s case will develop more this week as court hearings begin, so at the moment nobody really knows where it’ll lead. Such uncertainty no longer applies to the colleges themselves.

Last week, the administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and announced it was undertaking a review of billions more in grants. Finally, we had the answer to a lingering question: Would there be any tangible consequences for the schools that allowed their campuses to descend into prolonged bouts of anti-Semitic hysteria?

Universities clearly took President Biden’s passivity as a reason to bet against being held to account for their flagrant violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. If they were right, that meant that the only students they had to placate were the anti-Zionists: There was no reason to protect Jewish rights or Jewish safety on campus because the Jews would never cause anywhere near the same amount of trouble for them. In contrast, there were a thousand scrawny segregationists in keffiyehs with nothing to do but wait for orders from their Hamasnik organizers.

But now the playing field has changed entirely. A source at Columbia told the journalist Steve McGuire that the Trump Education Department’s threats weren’t empty: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”

‘Jews defending other Jews is a revolutionary act’ David Christopher Kaufman on why the Jewish diaspora must stand up for Israel.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/13/jews-defending-other-jews-is-a-revolutionary-act/

David Christopher Kaufman was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:

When does anti-Zionism become outright anti-Semitism? Since 7 October 2023, it has become disturbingly commonplace for ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations to demand the total destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Claims that Israel deliberately targets children have echoes of the ancient, anti-Semitic blood libel. Sympathy for Hamas, a terror group committed to the murder of Jews, is also disturbingly widespread in a protest movement that claims to stand for ‘peace’.

David Christopher Kaufman – editor and columnist at the New York Post – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why Jews need to be more vocal in standing up for Israel. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim that, in the aftermath of 7 October, people were marching against Israel, rather than against Jewish people?

David Christopher Kaufman: The horror of that statement is that, when people turn on Jews, the endgame is usually an attempt at mass extermination.

Jews have often been alright in history. They were alright in Weimar Germany. In many ways, Jews were alright in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in late-15th-century Spain. But, suddenly, they weren’t alright. Millions of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and millions of Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Second World War.

It pains me greatly to see so many Jewish people not speaking up. We had Adrien Brody winning an Oscar for playing a Holocaust victim for the second time in his career. Yet he said nothing about anti-Semitism, even while he was on the biggest stage in the world, benefiting from telling Jewish stories. In many ways, our own people are not doing their job. We’re allowing the bad guys to define the narrative.

Antisemitism on the Hill A Senate committee discusses Jew-hatred. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/antisemitism-on-the-hill/

On March 5, the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill was the setting for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that was truly fascinating. The subject: antisemitism, in particular the displays of vicious Jew-hatred that have taken place on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023.

It’s a subject that the Democrats have tried to avoid for years because it sorely divides their ranks. After all, several congressional Democrats – notably members of the so-called “Squad” – are openly antagonistic toward Jews and deeply hostile to Israel. In 2019, a House resolution condemning antisemitism – introduced in the wake of remarks by the appalling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the members of the Squad – was watered down by Democrats into a general condemnation of all hatred and intolerance.

Well, it’s a new day. Hence this two-and-a-half-hour hearing, which was made possible by the fact that the Republicans won a senatorial majority in the November elections. Of the five witnesses, three were selected by the Republicans: Adela Cojab of the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law;  and Asra Q. Nomani of the Pearl Project. All had powerful, disturbing things to say about the rise in student antisemitism since October 7.

Cojab, for instance, recalled a college class in Middle Eastern Studies in which she’d asked the professor whether bin Laden should be considered a terrorist. “Everybody laughed,” she said – because, you see, her classmates had all been taught that the terrorist label is vulgar and simplistic. Indeed, Cojab explained, they’d been taught a lot of things – among them, that “the political is personal”; that the world is divided into the “global north and global south,” the former of which is always wrong and the latter always right; and that it’s permissible to commit acts of violence “if your ideology is correct.”

The Moral Inversion of Antisemitism A review of Robert Spencer’s new masterpiece, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-inversion-of-antisemitism/

After Oct 7, Robert Spencer, the eminent scholar of religions and expert on Islamic terrorism, witnessed the irrational return of antisemitism, not just on the left, but also on the right.

“Fervent and articulate opponents of globalism and socialism began sending me articles in which globalists and socialists rehearsed all the alleged evils and misdeeds of Israel,” he writes.

“Vociferous critics of the United Nations began citing its figures on civilian deaths in Gaza.”

In response, Spencer began working on what would become his latest book, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. Spencer, already the author of numerous critically acclaimed books touching on the intersections of religion and history including ‘Empire of God’, about the Byzantine Empire, ‘The Palestinian Delusion’ and his recent, ‘Muhammad: A Critical Biography’, once again goes back in time and perhaps further so than his past books have ever traveled before.

In  ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer traces the origins of antisemitism to an initial pagan reaction against the translation of the Bible until “in the ancient world, revisionist versions of the accounts in the Jewish scriptures became a cottage industry.” Antisemitism became a way to rebut scripture and with it the moral foundations of a divine religion. The more contemptible the Jews were, the less reason there was to respect anything that Moses and later prophets had to say. This echoes the moral inversion that Spencer now sees all around him on social media in which the Jews attacked on Oct 7 become the perpetrators and Hamas becomes the victim.

In trying to understand this present day moral inversion, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ travels through the ancient pagan world, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, through to the rise of Christianity in which Spencer, a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church, grapples with the troubled history of antisemitism in Christianity, and then on to the Muslim world.

Christopher F. Rufo The Anti-Semitic Influencer Problem Narratives against Jews have taken a different turn.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-influencers-conspiracy-theories-kanye-west-candace-owens-andrew-tate

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had broken out in riots, with mobs of black residents targeting Jewish institutions. Early the next morning, a group of young black men stabbed and beat a Jewish graduate student to death.

As the tensions escalated, the race hustler Al Sharpton organized protests at the scene, portraying Jews as nefarious “diamond dealers” responsible for the global exploitation of blacks. Another round of looting, vandalism, and violence followed.

Flash forward to the present. Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, terror campaign against Israel and created fertile ground for another propaganda war. In the United States, left-wing academics seized the moment to rally support for the “decolonization” of Israel, and in the digital realm, a new anti-Semitism has reared its head. Several influential online commentators—most notably, Kanye West, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate—have used the attention around October 7 to push conspiracy theories and, especially in West’s case, outright anti-Semitism, on podcasts and social media platforms, ostensibly from a “right-wing” perspective.

The two episodes provide a fascinating point of comparison. Anti-Semitism is an ancient affliction, but it takes a different shape throughout history, depending on the culture, language, and technology of the moment. In today’s case, we see a resurgent anti-Semitism that has scrambled politics and perpetuated itself in cyberspace. In short, the Crown Heights riots have been digitized.

The first thing to understand is that Sharpton’s activism was a form of flesh-and-blood ethnic politics adapted to the televisual era. His narrative in Crown Heights was built on a particular grievance, against particular people, in a particular neighborhood. It generated its power on a left-wing trope: that Jews were oppressing poor blacks, and that the government was favoring “white interloper[s]” over native minorities. Sharpton’s desired outcome was tangible: he sought the imprisonment of the driver and, more broadly, cash for his organization, which operated like a mafia protection racket.

The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media “influencers” who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.

The memory-holing of a pogrom The Jew hunt in Amsterdam last November was even worse than we thought. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/10/the-memory-holing-of-a-pogrom/

They called their rampage a ‘Jew hunt’. They incited each other to violence, saying ‘[we] may never get this chance [again] to beat up some fucking Jews’. They called for a city-wide ‘rage’ against ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’. They damned the Jews as a ‘cowardly’ people. They shared information about the arrival of a ‘train full of Jews’ and said everyone should be there to greet it, because ‘we have to make those cancer Jews feel what they did to our brothers’. The train could be late, one of them joked, because it might be a ‘special train’ laid on by Hitler, ‘with gas for [the Jews]’.

Where were these racist obscenities uttered? Where was this violent hunt for Jews carried out? Germany in 1938, perhaps? No, it was in Amsterdam, last year. This was the jodenjacht of November 2024 when visiting Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv were ‘hunted’ by mobs of mostly Arab men in the streets of Amsterdam. More details about this pogrom emerged during the latest court cases last week, and they heap yet further shame on the pogrom deniers of the Western left who insisted these were just street clashes, not a Jew hunt.

Five more of Amsterdam’s alleged Jew hunters found themselves in the dock last week. One – Mounir M, aged 32 – is charged with being an administrator of the WhatsApp group in which the violence was incited and organised. Originally called ‘Free Palstine’ (sic), the group later changed its name to ‘Buurthuis 2’ (Dutch for ‘Community Centre 2’). Racial animus and open calls for violence swirled through this ominous chat. Drive your car ‘into those people’, one participant said. ‘Hit them hard’, said another. There must be ‘at least one death’, dreamed one messenger. There were also tips for how to incite the Maccabi fans. Shout ‘Free Palestine’ at them, the mob was advised.

Mounir M is said to have helped oversee this group that seethed with Jew hate. As the Dutch daily paper Het Parool reported, last week’s court proceedings ‘left little to the imagination: participants in the group… incited each other to hunt down Jews’. The court heard that the group was full of ‘insulting words about Jews’, alongside calls for action. There were ‘quips’ too, like the one about Hitler’s special train, with gas in it. Mounir M is accused of responding in the most chilling way to a message about the hotel in which Maccabi fans had taken refuge from the blows of the Jew hunters. ‘Get rid of it’, he allegedly wrote.

Another suspect in the current trial – Mahmoud A, a Palestinian asylum seeker – faces a more serious charge: attempted manslaughter. A video clip allegedly shows him kicking a Maccabi supporter in the head four times as he was lying on the ground. The three other suspects face charges of ‘providing information to commit violence’, trivialising and condoning the Holocaust, and using a belt to whip an elderly visiting Israeli. The Dutch paper De Telegraaf said at the end of last week that this latest ‘Trial of the Jew hunters’ has ‘severely shocked’ the people of the Netherlands. It is horrifying, it said, that an event of such a ‘clearly anti-Semitic character’ could take place in modern-day Amsterdam.