WEEKEND NEWS TOMORROW
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/01/11/harvard-to-host-pro-terrorist-anti-israel-summer-program-n4925395
Scandal-ridden Harvard University is doubling down on its antisemitism with a plan to host a summer program in partnership with a pro-jihadi Palestinian school.
In the wake of the unspeakably heinous Hamas attack on Israelis on Oct. 7, which the terrorists proudly broadcast to the world, a horrifying number of Westerners deliberately ignored what the terrorists and Gazans themselves avow and all historical and current evidence to support the Gazans and demonize Israel. Sadly, this was especially true of college students, as anti-Semitism is rife on campuses poisoned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
“Harvard University will host a summer program where students will be briefed on ‘settler colonialism’ at a Palestinian university that called for ‘glory to martyrs’ after the October 7 terrorist massacre in Israel and has a student body that overwhelmingly elected a Hamas-affiliated bloc to run its student government,” The Daily Wire reported on Jan. 10. If you don’t know, “glory to the martyrs” is a slogan celebrating terrorists who are killed while waging jihad on Israel.
Harvard’s “Palestine Social Medicine Course” is set to send students for the second year in a row to Birzeit University in the “West Bank,” which is the Palestinian misnomer for Judea and Samaria (which belonged to ancient Israel centuries before Islam was invented).
Below is from the program website, but keep in mind there is no such thing as “occupied Palestinian territories.” The latter term is merely terrorist propaganda, falsely claiming ownership of land that rightfully belongs to Israel:
This three-week intensive summer course is designed to introduce students to the social, structural, political, and historical aspects that determine Palestinian health beyond the biological basis of disease…
The course offers both conceptual and practical engagement with the structural determinants of health affecting Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel, and the Diaspora. The Palestine Social Medicine Course occurs annually at Birzeit University in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territories. It includes travel throughout the West Bank and Israel for site visits focused on evaluating the range of health care available, as well as the variable social conditions which contribute to and determine health outcomes.
Curriculum content includes “Settler colonialism and its manifestations in Palestine” and “Health and racism.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/01/antizionism_emisem_antisemitism_.html
If, as the Washington Post editorial title says, “Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism…” (1/7/24), then why is the one tiny Jewish state the only country in the world challenged over its right to exist?
Further, if anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism, why are those that shout and riot against Israel wantonly attacking Jews indiscriminately? Why are antisemitic attacks up throughout the world including America especially on college campuses?
In France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, “The interior ministry recorded more than 1,500 incidents [of antisemitism] in the six weeks following 7 October, ranging from the desecration of cemeteries to antisemitic graffiti and banners, social media attacks, vandalism against Jewish property, threats against Jews and a handful of assaults,” according to the Guardian.
Students at college campuses across America report widespread intimidation and harassment for being Jewish. Just in the past week, at a NY high school girl’s basketball game, a Jewish High School team was taunted with screams of “I support Hamas, you f–king Jew” by opposing players.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-students-sue-university-over-failure-to-address-severe-and-pervasive-antisemitic-harassment-on-campus/
Harvard University students filed a lawsuit against university officials on Wednesday, claiming they have failed to protect Jewish students from “severe and pervasive” antisemitic harassment sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.
In a 79-page federal civil complaint, six Harvard graduate and law students who are members of Students Against Antisemitism say the university “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”
The suit says pro-Palestinian protests on campus have been rife with “vile” bigotry against Jews and Israel.
”Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel,” the suit said. “Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus.”
Jewish students have also been met with antisemitic attacks online and in classes where faculty members have allegedly “promulgated antisemitism.”
“Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world,” the complaint says. “Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.”
The suit comes after Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month amid mounting pressure over scandals involving her comments at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses and over allegations that she had plagiarized in her past academic works.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/american-jews-enabling-anti-semitism/
The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT assert in a Congressional hearing that calling on campus for the genocide of the Jews is an exercise in free speech and so not a violation of university policies. The breath-taking hypocrisy of this claim, to say nothing of its immorality, was obvious to everyone who does not subscribe to the newspeak of American academia. Such a call for genocide with regard to any other group would, of course, not be tolerated. In addition, all three universities are constantly violating free speech precepts by limiting the access of conservative voices to their campuses and barring other sorts of speech that favored groups might find offensive.
The university presidents’ tolerance for campus voices advocating slaughter of the Jews was not because doing so is free speech but because doing so is cost-free. Much of the schools’ progressive and Muslim faculty and staff, as well as of their student bodies, are militantly anti-Semitic and forcefully oppose any gesture by university administrators supportive of Jews or of Israel. In contrast, university administrators typically pay no price for anti-Semitic gestures. Similarly, the haters have paid no price for aggressively exhibiting their bigotry, and they expect to pay none.
This dynamic has a long pedigree. A history of murderous anti-Semitism and its roots always entails disentangling the various, protean rationales of Jew-hatred. There is religious bias, racial and ethnic bias, class bias. And there are the many contradictory hateful indictments of Jews. Jews are too white; Jews are not white enough. Jews are capitalists; Jews are socialists and communists. Jews are too insular; Jews are too assimilationist. Jews are globalists; Jews are nationalists. Jews are too secular; Jews are too religious. But amid the contradictory indictments, there has been one constant that has always facilitated Jew-hatred in all its forms. It has always been largely cost-free for the haters. Jews have virtually always been in no position to exact a cost. The bigots, and those in positions of authority who give them a pass, have almost never had to take into account the threat of pushback in their calculations of how far to go with their hate-mongering.
Today, Israel can push back against its genocidal neighbors. Its catastrophic failure to deter Hamas from undertaking and then executing the horrors of October 7 is at least being followed by a military campaign that has the capacity to dismantle the terror organization and deter others from attempting to emulate October 7.
The American Jewish community also has some ability to push back. It is less helpless than Diaspora communities have typically been over the last two millennia.
https://www.thefp.com/p/resigned-mit-october-7-antisemitism
For most academics, getting a job at MIT is a dream. Until October 7, it was for me. But in December, I resigned from my post because I could no longer deal with the pervasive antisemitism on MIT’s campus.
How I got there is a story that is unique to me, but it’s also a story about what’s happening across American academia today.
I was born in Mexico to a Jewish family. I immigrated to the States in the 1980s to obtain a master’s at Harvard, and then moved to Israel for my PhD in computer science from Hebrew University. In 1989, I started working as an assistant professor at MIT, and after a career in the financial industry, I returned in 2019 as a lecturer.
As a computer scientist, I normally don’t have time for politics. But when Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday, October 7, brutally murdering 1,200 Israelis, I emailed the head of my department and urged her to issue a statement of support for Israelis and Jews. I assumed the reason was obvious. The university had sent statements before on various issues—such as a message condemning the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and another standing in solidarity with the Asian community amid a wave of hate crimes in 2021.
On Monday, the head of my department and its office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) sent out a message titled “A time for community support of each other.”
The message was riddled with equivocations, without mentioning the barbarity of Hamas’s attack, stating only that “we are deeply horrified by the violence against civilians and wish to express our deep concern for all those involved.” I was shocked that my institution—led by people who are meant to see the world rationally—could not simply condemn a brutal terrorist act.
That same day, the protests on campus started. Students chanted “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea” with fury and at times glee, like they were reciting catchy songs instead of slogans demanding the erasure of the Jewish people.
https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/01/05/department-of-education-launches-an-investigation-of-sdsu-for-an-email-about-october-7-n4925255
The U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation of San Diego State University. The reason? Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the school sent out a campus-wide email that talked about the pain and horror of the attack itself and committed the sin of offering students counseling. Of course, in 21st-century America, in which members of select demographics are perpetual victims, someone decided the email was offensive.
Campus Reform talked with a spokesperson from SDSU who confirmed that the university had been informed of the investigation, which came on the heels of a complaint that the email showed that the school “discriminated against Islamic, Arab, and/or Palestinian students by sending an all-campus email on Oct. 9.” To put a bow on it, the complaint also said that the missive “promoted hate and racism against Arabs and Muslims.”
The DOE issued a press release in November stating that the investigation was in response to the “rise in antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment on college campuses and in K-12 schools since the October 7 Israel-Hamas conflict.”
Note the use of the word “conflict” as opposed to the word “attacks.” And the conspicuous absence of the word “terrorism.”
Those issues aside, the press release from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also included the expected phrase, “Hate has no place in our schools, period.” It also expressed concern for Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and any other students of any other “ethnicity or shared ancestry.”
The release said the DOE wants to make sure that it ensures “safe and inclusive learning environments.” It concludes: “These investigations underscore how seriously the Biden-Harris Administration, including the U.S. Department of Education, takes our responsibility to protect students from hatred and discrimination.”
Someone please remind me what the Biden Administration has done to protect Jews on or off campus from violence, intimidation, and harassment since Oct. 7, 2023. Never mind, I won’t insult your intelligence waiting for an answer.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/this-is-the-tipping-point-canadian-jewish-business-firebombed-defaced-with-free-palestine-graffiti/?utm_
A Jewish-owned grocery store in Toronto was firebombed and defaced with “Free Palestine” graffiti early Wednesday morning.
“I’ve been a criminal investigator the vast majority of my career, and in most of those criminal investigations, there was a tipping point. This is this tipping point,” Toronto Police Service spokeswoman Pauline Gray said outside the vandalized International Delicatessen Foods building, which is located in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
“This is not graffiti on a bus shelter. This is not lawful protest protected by constitutional right. This is a criminal act. It is violent, it is targeted, it is organized, and it will receive the weight of the Toronto Police Service to exactly what it deserves,” Gray continued. “We will leave no stone unturned. We will use all the resources available to us to investigate, arrest and prosecute who is responsible for this.”
Ya’ara Saks, the Liberal Party parliamentary representative for the district, condemned the apparent hate crime in a public note. “I have just learned the shocking news of the attack in #YorkCentre at the Jewish-owned local business International Delicatessen Foods. With each brazen act of incitement and of violence, the cycle of antisemitism and hateful acts increases. This must stop,” Saks, a minister in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, wrote Wednesday afternoon.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canadian-medical-leader-resigns-from-university-posting-citing-campus-antisemitism/
A veteran medical professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) resigned his academic post citing the school administration’s indifference to campus antisemitism.
Over 200 medical students signed a petition following the 10/7 atrocities denouncing Israel as a “settler colonial state,” guilty of “collective punishment.” The public letter made no reference to Hamas nor the hundreds of Israeli civilians taken hostage by the Palestinian terror group. “UBC’s declared support for decolonization and practices of equity, diversity and inclusion ring hollow in light of this partisan approach,” the document, which was also signed by over 100 faculty members across the university, argued in late October.
The petition was a response to an official communication from UBC on October 11 which expressed “heartfelt condolences to those in our community who are grieving incomprehensible loss and hoping for the safe return of their loved ones.” “As this conflict deepens and innocent civilians are caught in the tragic repercussions in Israel, Gaza and elsewhere, the implications are distressing for those with families and friends affected,” the letter, authored by the school’s interim president, wrote.
The professor cited the petition and the administration’s failure to address campus antisemitism as the driving force behind his departure. “One third of the medical students and some faculty, have publicly expressed their contempt towards me, as a Jew. I cannot take the risk of being accused of implicit harassment or racism, which is indefensible, by a ‘triggered’ student,” Ted Rosenberg, a family medicine academic at UBC for three decades wrote to the medical school dean.
“Unfortunately, I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred, or my right to work in a depoliticized environment.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/cancel-culture-meets-anti-semitism-at-uc-berkeley/
In the wake of 10/7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Ivy League universities have been taking heat for campus anti-Semitism. That has also been going on at UC Berkeley, once known as a bastion of free speech. Consider the case of Dan Kalb, an Oakland city councilman and climate activist.
On November 21, Kalb was slated to address undergraduates in an Environmental Problem Solving course, a class he had addressed before. This time, pro-Hamas students responded with a letter stating:
As an Oakland City Council member with a platform advocating for environmental and social justice, affordable housing, and universal access to health care, among other things, it is utterly disappointing and hypocritical for someone of your esteem to be in support of the apartheid state of Israel and the current and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Students attacked Kalb for his “active role in retweeting and spreading pro-Israeli propaganda, which often equates pro-Palestinian voices as ‘anti-Semitic.’” The letter made no mention of Hamas atrocities, now acknowledged even by the New York Times. Adjunct professor Kurt Spreyer, instructor of the course, told Kalb the students might disrupt the class, so it was better that he not appear.
“If someone wants to go speak about climate change — they are an expert on climate change — what the hell does Israel or Zionism have to do with that?” Kalb told the Jewish News of Northern California. “Why not put a yellow star on our sleeve? How about we do that too?”
Kalb had been “condemning the murderous Hamas terrorists repeatedly,” and in his view “Hamas must be unequivocally condemned and, if possible, dismantled so this never happens again.” When Kalb saw people denying evidence of Hamas atrocities, he said, “That’s not anti-Zionism. That’s anti-Semitism,” and that problem “apparently is not exclusive to the law school.” In fact, UC Berkeley is being sued by Jewish groups and students over “longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism.”
