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ANTI-SEMITISM

What Is Campus Life Like for a Jewish Zionist Student? A guest essay by Maya Rackoff

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/what-is-campus-life-like-for-a-jewish?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2From Glenn Loury

Almost daily, we see images and read news stories about the effect of the Gaza War on college campuses. The dynamics of those stories vary from campus to campus—every university has its own particular student culture and its own administrative response. For an outsider, it can be difficult to understand the complex social dynamics at work beneath the protests and rallies. The opposing demonstrators and counter-demonstrators know each other and may even consider each other friends. They have classes together, live in the same dorms, and eat in the same dining halls. And yet, when the placards are raised and the chants begin, they often level accusations at each other that would seem to make friendship, or even peaceful coexistence, impossible going forward.

My intern, Maya Rackoff, is a student at Brown, where I teach. She is a proud and open Jewish Zionist, an identification that, at this famously liberal school, comes with a social price, despite the fact that she is deeply sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Palestinians. I wanted to know how she is navigating campus life now that her beliefs and identity are at the forefront of world events, and students like her often feel demonized and scapegoated. She wrote this essay in response. It offers an insider’s account of one of the many ways that the Gaza War is altering life here in the US.

A Sense of Paralysis for Jewish Zionist Students

by Maya Rackoff

I am a junior at Brown University majoring in history. I’m originally from New York City, where I grew up immersed in the Upper West Side Jewish community. At Brown, I’ve become very involved in our Hillel, the primary center for Jewish student engagement on college campuses.

I am truly scared about the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, and I worry about my safety whenever I am in the Hillel building. Before October 7, I walked around the building with ease. Now, the building is monitored by more security guards than ever, and I worry each time I see someone unfamiliar. I especially fear the days when there are pro-Palestinian rallies on our main green, in which hundreds of students verbally intimidate Zionist and Israeli students.

Demonstrating against Jew-hatred isn’t enough A direct line runs between defamation of Israel and attacks on Jews Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/demonstrating-against-jew-hatred?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The enormous demonstration against antisemitism in London last Sunday provided a much-needed morale boost to the beleaguered Jewish community.

There is profound shock that the barbaric Hamas pogrom in Israel on October 7 has given rise to a tsunami of incitement, intimidation and abuse of Jews. In this appalling situation, the emergence of tens of thousands of decent British citizens declaring their support for the Jewish people was heartening indeed.

However, declaring abhorrence of antisemitism needs to be backed by action if it is to mean anything.

The government has stated its solidarity with Israel over the massacre and has vowed to combat antisemitism. Yet if it really wanted to tackle this eruption of the oldest hatred, it would be addressing what’s driving it.

It would be speaking out against the virulent Islamic antisemitism that’s now on display in Britain and worldwide. It would be shutting down mosques where imams are preaching incitement against Jews and Israel.

It would be educating the country about the extraordinary lengths to which Israel goes in order to avoid harming Gaza’s civilians, unmatched by any other country.

It would be declaring that anyone who portrays Israel as genocidal, Nazi or guilty of illegality or human rights abuses is perpetrating a grotesque lie about the Jewish state that incites abuse and violence against Jews everywhere.

But the government has said none of these things. Instead the new Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, has actually fuelled the demonisation of Israel.

Echoing the malign barbs delivered by the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, Cameron lectured Israeli leaders that “they must abide by international humanitarian law, that the number of casualties are too high and that they have to have that top of their mind”.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

The news from Israel is dominated by reports of war, hostage exchanges, and hostages including children still in bondage in appalling conditions. Beyond the headlines Israeli resilience and patriotism, and research and development to benefit humanity continue apace. Michael Ordman compiles an essential catalog of the foregoing every week. Here is positive news at a time of suffering and despair. Read it all…..rsk

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR

Female tank crews save kibbutzim. (TY Manfred) On Oct 7 Israel’s all-female tank crews made history when they fought Hamas terrorists and prevented them from overrunning many Israeli southern communities. They are the first female armored crews in Israel, and perhaps the world, to participate in active battle.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/female-idf-tank-crews-ran-down-dozens-of-hamas-terrorists-on-october-7/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjy0wpdSAI0

The farmer who neutralized a Hamas cell. Eran Smilansky was a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz’s emergency squad. On Oct 7, he eliminated eight Hamas terrorists who had stormed his home. He then saved his father and his two daughters at his father’s home that the terrorists had tried to burn down with his family inside.

https://idsf.org.il/en/stories-of-valor/singlehandedly-neutralized-a-terrorists-cell/

Eritrean given residency for saving life. Eritrean national Mulugeta Tsagi received permanent residency status in Israel as a “thank you” for saving an Israeli soldier’s life on Oct. 7. Tsagi gave lifesaving first aid to an IDF officer shot by Hamas in Sderot, then stayed with him for several hours until he finally reached hospital.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/eritrean-given-permanent-residency-in-israel-after-saving-idf-officers-life-on-oct-7/  https://www.jns.org/eritrean-granted-israeli-residency-for-oct-7-heroism/

What’s cooking? Beraha Astruk is a Head Nurse at Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya. After work, she voluntarily spends her evenings and weekends cooking for two IDF battalions stationed near the northern border. She even invites the soldiers to do their laundry at her house. Beraha has two sons in the IDF in Gaza.

https://www.israel21c.org/after-hospital-shifts-head-nurse-cooks-for-idf-battalions/

Care for released hostages. (TY Cynthia) Schneider Children’s Hospital is THE hospital designated to receive many of the released children and their families. It has a media-free area, decorated recovery rooms, a multi-disciplinary team of medical and support staff, even family pets are allowed. See photos & donation links here.

https://www.schneider.org.il/?CategoryID=844&ArticleID=5328

https://www.schneider.org.il/?CategoryID=1011&ArticleID=5327

https://www.justgiving.com/ukfriendsofschneider/donate (UK donors)

https://www.schneider.org.il/?CategoryID=1063&ArticleID=3238 (Israeli & US donors)

Late birthday present for released hostage. On his 9th birthday, Ohad Munder was a hostage in Gaza. He was told that his favorite soccer team, Hapoel Be’er Sheva, wished him a happy birthday on TV. It gave Ohad renewed strength and on his release, the players visited him in hospital.

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-soccer-teams-heartfelt-reunion-with-9-year-old-captive-is-a-birthday-wish-fulfilled/

Entrepreneur raises $40 million for IDF. Since Oct 7, Dutch-based Israeli entrepreneur Eran Efrat, has raised some $40 million to produce tactical gear for IDF soldiers. He didn’t simply give the money to the army but directly solicited US-based manufacturers to produce helmets, ceramic vests, and more.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bkseqpnnp

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Liver cancer patient saved. A patient with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) who participated in the Phase II trials of namodenoson from Israel’s Can-Fite (see here previously) had an extremely good response. His liver function returned to normal, and he is looking forward to a good quality of life.

https://ir.canfite.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1035/can-fite-complete-response-and-6-9-yearsoverall-survival

Traffic lights to silence cancer genes. (TY Laura) Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered how DNA methylation acts as a gene control system, like a traffic light that can modulate gene activity and trigger or prevent cancer mutations. It will help develop personalized therapies for cancer patients.

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-775427

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-023-03094-6

Clearing the airways. The LibAirty compression vest from Israel’s Synchrony Medical (see here previously) has begun clinical (human) trials at the National Cystic Fibrosis Center of Sheba Medical Center, where it was developed. Synchrony’s CEO says the device is twice as effective as similar products currently on the market. 

https://nocamels.com/2023/11/compression-vest-that-clears-the-lungs-in-clinical-trial-in-israel/

Amorphous calcium to treat IBD. Israel’s Amorphical (see here previously) has adapted its amorphous calcium carbonate production technology to treat inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis. The mineral neutralizes the acidity within affected tissue to prevent inflammation.

https://nocamels.com/category/news-briefs/#post-125592

Developing RNA-based treatments for rare diseases. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Skip Therapeutics is partnering with Sheba Medical Center to develop ASO-based (short RNA sequences) treatments for rare genetic diseases. Skip’s ASOs (Antisense Oligonucleotide) aim to restore the function of mutated genes in genetic disorders.

https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/skip-therapeutics-and-sheba-medical-center-to-collaborate-for-the-development-of-rna-based-treatments-for-rare-diseases-301994662.html   https://www.skiptx.com/

Frank Furedi:The woke scapegoating of the Jews The Western left’s response to Hamas’s atrocities has exposed a virulent new form of anti-Semitism.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/12/the-woke-scapegoating-of-the-jews/

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled ‘progressives’ have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that ‘the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid’.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an ‘All Out for Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent ‘comedy’ material. ‘As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time’, he said, ‘until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters’. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this ‘joke’ about the mass murder and kidnapping of ‘several dozen hipsters’ with gales of laughter.

Genocidal Hatred of Jews and the West by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20188/genocidal-hatred-jews-west

Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.

In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union wanted to gain more influence in the Arab Muslim world, its leaders decided to support what was at the time a sacred cause for Arab leaders: the attempt to destroy Israel. They… chose to invent a “national liberation struggle”…. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with the task of “liberating Palestine,” and the borders of “Palestine” on the maps used by the PLO showed that the goal was to erase Israel from the face of the earth.

Western leftists started vocally to express hatred of “imperialist Israel” and, ironically, the hard-won democratic freedoms they were at that moment enjoying to the fullest: freedom of speech, assembly, education, sexuality, and supposedly equal justice under the law.

The Oslo Accords only made everything worse. By signing them, Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized… that a terrorist organization was somehow the legitimate representative of a people invented fewer than three decades earlier, and that this invented “people” had “rights” and deserved to have territory and self-government.

In reality, it was Israel that decolonized the land from the grip of the British, who governed it from 1917 until Israel’s war of independence in 1948.

The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere…. These demonstrations also show that support for the “Palestinian cause” sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.

[I]f nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of “democracy” of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups — the worst is bound to come.

Antisemitic terror has deep, surprising roots in American soil. Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/hamas-made-in-the-u-s-a/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

After the jihadist barbarities of October 7, Israel responded with aerial bombardments of Hamas havens in Gaza, in preparation for the now-ongoing ground invasion. As the bombs fell, Hamas heavyweight Mousa Abu Marzook was asked about the elaborate network of tunnels that the organization has built under the territory it has governed since being popularly elected in 2006. It is a virtual underground city stretching over 300 miles, constructed with untold billions of dollars in foreign-aid money diverted for the purpose (not to be confused with the aid money diverted to make billionaires out of Marzook and his fellow Hamas emirs).

Since Hamas has built tunnels instead of bomb shelters, the friendly Russia Today TV reporter wondered, why doesn’t it just let Gazans use the tunnels to shelter from Israeli attacks?

Marzook’s answer was chillingly matter-of-fact. The tunnels were not built for so-called civilians; they were built for the jihadists:

We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.

Of course Marzook (sometimes spelled “Mazouk” or “Marzuq”) is not fighting from inside a tunnel. He was speaking from his posh offices in Qatar.

Harps, Shamrocks and Anti-Semitism

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/11/nazis/

“Two days after neo-Nazi terrorists from Gaza slaughtered, raped and burnt 1400 Israeli Jews, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Israel Embassy in Dublin to denounce Israel.” Now that is the kind of absurd sentence that once upon a very distant time would have got students at journalism class into dire trouble. “It doesn’t make sense,” would scold the dried-out old veteran of two hundred bars, half a dozen newsrooms and three and half wives. “You clearly mean the protesters had gathered outside the Palestinian Embassy in Dublin to protest at the murder of Jews, so please don’t dress up the hideous truth with these misbegotten attempts at satire.”

Ah, but that was once upon a distant time. In the woeful here and now, this is surreal, a bad dream, a very bad dream. This after all had occurred on October 7, 2023, not October 7, 1943. The latter date was when Hitler met his Gauleiters at his Wolf’s Lair to discuss the remaining details of the Final Solution, to be concluded that year. But since that terrible day in 1943, and up until its eightieth anniversary in 2023, no government could publicly mass-murder Jews anywhere. Even Himmler, Hitler’s executioner of the Jewish people, that October had written of the extermination program, “This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

That was the point about that Final Solution: even by the utterly debased standards of the Nazis, it was such a shameful business that it had to be kept secret. “The Jews must be exterminated,” said Himmler privately. “I do not consider myself justified murdering the menfolk … while leaving their children to grow up and to take their vengeance on our sons and grandsons.”

Whereas the Final Solution of October 7, 2023, was to be a very public affair, and the first target would be the fun-loving liberal Jews attending an all-night rave, to be videoed and celebrated on social media. All previous genocides had been secret, and covered up, as in the Nazi execution pits at Babi Yar, the gas chambers of Belzec, or the death camps of the Khmer Rouge, Stalin’s NKVD and Mao’s Red China.

72 Columbia Student Groups Issue Anti-Israel, Terrorist-Empathizing Manifesto Catherine Salgado

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/11/24/72-columbia-student-groups-issue-anti-israel-terrorist-empathizing-manifesto-n4924201

One disturbing outcome of the current Israel-Hamas conflict is the exposure of radical anti-Semitism at American universities. Over 70 student groups at Columbia University just issued a manifesto against Israel that would have made the Nazis proud.

Two student groups at Columbia were suspended recently for repeatedly threatening and intimidating Jewish students, as PJ Media’s Rick Moran reported. Dozens of Israel-hating, terrorist-empathizing Columbia student groups want them reinstated. Perhaps it’s not surprising at a school funded by globalist anti-Israel billionaire George Soros…

The heinous Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack left hundreds of Israelis dead and forced Israeli authorities to come to grips with the reality that Arabs, who have no right at all to Israeli land, have been refusing peace in favor of trying to destroy Israel for decades, and they’re not going to change their minds now. The majority of Gazans support jihad against Israel, and the Gaza Strip is controlled by the terrorist group Hamas and the terrorist-funding Palestinian Authority (PA), which use civilians as human shields. Yet Columbia student groups issued a perverted Nov. 14 manifesto based entirely off anti-Semitic terrorist propaganda!

The manifesto even had the audacity to accuse Columbia of anti-Semitism for shutting down Jewish Voice for Peace, which openly intimidated other Jews! While explicitly spreading Hamas propaganda and vilifying Israel with hideous lies, these woke student groups saw no hypocrisy in mentioning anti-Semitism. “We know that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism—in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians—are all cut from the same cloth: Western colonization, imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness,” the manifesto screeched. Jews are always framed as white colonialist oppressors in academia, and the students are apparently unaware that Arabs have a long history of racism against black people.

Ironically, the manifesto signers included Columbia Queer and Asian, Columbia Queer Alliance, Proud Colors, and GSAS Queer Graduate Collective. Yet if these LGBTQ radicals went to Palestinian-controlled areas, because the Palestinians are Muslim, these Columbia activists  would “risk summary execution” and face harsh persecution. Ultimately, Hamas would be happy to kill every single one of these woke Columbia students, except possibly some of the Muslims, but the students probably couldn’t be brought to realize that until and unless they were actually being killed. This is the level of willful ignorance and self-delusion at Columbia:

We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization, and also to combating anti-Blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.

Time to take a stand against the new Jew hatred Join the March Against Anti-Semitism in London this Sunday. Tom Slater

https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/

Following the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7th, accusations of genocide can be heard from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. These accusations, however, are not being made against the massacre’s Palestinian perpetrators. They are intended to indict the prosecution of Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza and the consequent death toll there. From countries like Iran and Iraq, this kind of perversity was predictable. The virulent antisemitic reaction to the October 7th attacks in the West—which began before Israel attacked Hamas targets in Gaza—is more shocking. In the US alone, those who have taken the opportunity to accuse Israel of genocide include congressional staffers, a congressional representative, numerous university students, and a significant number of university professors.

This is not the first time that Israel has faced accusations of genocide. During the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel acted to neutralize the bases from which Palestinian guerillas were attacking the country’s north. An Israeli-backed Christian militia was ordered to clear the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, from which Israeli soldiers had taken fire during the campaign. In response to the recent assassination of Lebanon’s Christian president Bashir Gemayel, the militiamen killed a number of fighters and a still-unsettled number of Palestinian civilians. To this day, there is no agreement on how many were killed. The Red Cross said 460. Palestinian scholar Maher Sharif insists that the figure might have been as high as 4,500. Such is the politicization of casualty figures.

These events provoked global outrage, but it is important to note that they also provoked outrage within Israel itself. The 1983 report of the Israeli government’s Kahan Commission held the IDF indirectly responsible for the massacre and led to the resignation of defence minister Ariel Sharon. The UN General Assembly, however, went further than this, voting in 1982 to condemn the killing at Sabra and Shatila as an act of genocide, even though the UN had not investigated the crime. As the Soviets put it during the UN debate, Israel’s purpose “is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation.”

But “genocide” isn’t simply a word for reprehensible conduct in war. The term is defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as the demonstrable intent to destroy a national, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. Not only was the UNGA’s claim of genocidal intent and practice inconsistent with Israel’s own self-critical investigation of wrongdoing, but up to 300,000 Palestinian refugees still live in Lebanon today. The accusation of genocide, international-law expert William Schabas later wrote, was simply used by the UNGA “to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision.”

Georgetown Teams with Islamist Magazine to Whitewash Hamas, Deride Israeli Deaths by Andrew E. Harrod

https://www.newenglishreview.org/georgetown-teams-with-islamist-magazine-to-whitewash-hamas-deride-israeli-deaths/

Israel’s current military campaign to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip exhibits “blood lust,” stated Mouin Rabbani, coeditor of the Arab Studies Institute’s (ASI) Islamist webzine Jadaliyya, during a recent Georgetown University presentation. Sponsored by Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), “Israel-Gaza War: A Conversation with Mouin Rabbani” presented Rabbani’s Gaza ravings as fact.

As was visible in the event video, Rabbani addressed an audience in the conference room of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), another event sponsor with faculty that share his anti-Israel views. ACMCU’s new director, Rabbani’s fellow Israel-conspiracy-monger Nader Hashemi, moderated. The Qatari-affiliated Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) think tank, where Hashemi is listed as an expert, also sponsored Rabbani’s talk.

Rabbani described as pure revenge killings Israel’s rooting out of Hamas jihadists from their urban, largely underground hideouts following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. “Israeli public opinion was so outraged” that “Israeli leadership is kind of trying to make good on this by ensuring that many more Palestinians are killed than Israelis were killed on October 7,” he stated. “Flattening entire neighborhoods” is not “in any way significantly degrading actual military capabilities,” he added, as if Israel could avoid harming civilians whom Hamas deliberately exploits as human shields. Israel, he said, is committing “systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Palestinians suffering under Israel’s self-defense actions, not the Jewish and other Israeli citizens butchered by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, were to Rabbani as the real victims. He bemoaned the “demonization and delegitimization and dehumanization and outright repression of pro-Palestinian sentiment.” He complained of “selective outrage” when comparing Palestinian civilian deaths in combat, which Israel strives hard to avoid, with the Israelis mercilessly targeted by Hamas terror.

“When Palestinians are killed, we take an analytical approach; when Israelis are killed, the criteria is morality,” Rabbani stated. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “broke down on TV like a baby” after having examined images of Hamas’s ravaged victims, Rabbani callously noted, “a blubbering baby, for God’s sake.” Yet when Kirby later answered questions about civilian casualties from Israeli military operations, “all of a sudden he’s a tough guy, war is hell, civilians die, get over it. Ok, are you Jekyll or Hyde?” Rabbani sneered.