Left-wing groups and veteran demonstrators provided guidance and support before rise of pro-Palestinian encampments

Posted on May 9, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

WSJ
Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests
Tawnell D. Hobbs, Valerie Bauerlein and Dan Frosch
May 3, 2024

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups. At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers. READ MORE

POLITICO Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors Some of the most outspoken groups against Biden and Israel get funding from foundations attached to some of the biggest names in Democratic circles.

TABLET MAG The People Setting America on Fire As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.

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Yom HaZikaron: Heroes of October 7

Posted on May 8, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

UNPACKED
Yom HaZikaron: Heroes of October 7
May 2, 2024

This year’s Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, holds extra significance for the country, following the loss of many loved ones on October 7 and in its aftermath. Yuval Solomon cherished life and lived it fully. His father shares the story of his brave confrontation with terrorists who infiltrated their home on Simchat Torah, which was also Yuval’s birthday. Sahar Saudiyan, deeply committed to her country and its people, served as an Iron Dome officer to save lives. Her family recounts how she intercepted thousands of rockets that morning, protecting civilians before her own tragic death. Both Yuval and Sahar leave behind legacies to learn from, and their families have felt immense support, love, and purpose in living in a nation that views itself as one big family.

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Columbia University janitor: “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves”

Posted on May 8, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out
Francesca Block
May 6, 2024

It’s the viral image that captured the clash between the anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and the campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facilities worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall.  Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years. Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. READ MORE

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In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Posted on May 8, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
The Gantz Megillah
Gadi Taub
May 7, 2024

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken how to “share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them. If the Netanyahu problem is too big to contain, then it follows that it must be solved. And it seems that the Biden administration has zeroed in on what Tony Badran has called a Herodian solution: finding a local proxy who will impose the U.S. agenda on a reluctant Israeli electorate. READ MORE

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Finally, a university run by actual grown-ups: “The University of Florida is not daycare, and we don’t treat protesters like children”

Posted on May 4, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH INSIDER
UF President Ben Sasse: Negotiations with ‘the people who happen to scream the loudest,’ are unwise
Gabby Deutch
May 7, 2024

Last week, while college administrators across the U.S. seemed paralyzed over how to respond to campus anti-Israel protesters, one school weighed in with a simple statement that served as a counterweight to the hemming and hawing of elite private universities. “The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children,” a UF spokesperson said, declaring that students in an unauthorized encampment would face disciplinary action if they did not leave. The statement achieved every PR flak’s dream: It went viral. Much of the positive attention heaped on the school landed on Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska senator and Yale-educated historian who has been the president of UF since early 2023.  “It isn’t that complicated to affirm free speech and free assembly, which are fundamental American rights and something that institutionally we’re committed to. But that doesn’t mean that the people who are the loudest are the ones who don’t have to obey the rules that everybody else does…”READ MORE

JPOST American Jews should take a look at Catholic universities There are excellent Jewish institutions that have taken courageous stands, Yeshiva University and Brandeis University among them. But they cannot accommodate every Jewish student. Maybe it is time to start building on another foundation in front of us. Many Catholic liberal arts universities like Assumption do not have ivy growing up their walls. But neither do we have students occupying the buildings those walls enclose to demand the eradication of the only Jewish state in the world. READ MORE

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The White House and its supporters are using Muslims in Michigan to justify a slew of deeply hostile policies against Israel. Will that matter come fall?

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
The Jewish vote is up for grabs, and it may decide the election
Caroline Glick
May 3, 2024

…The Muslim vote, on the other hand, is always in contention. For the past decade or so, Muslim Americans have demanded that Democratic candidates earn their votes in every electoral cycle by adopting hostile positions on Israel and opposition to tough counterterror laws. Beginning in 2006, anti-Israel activists from the Marxist-Islamic bloc have repeatedly ousted pro-Israel Democrats from office and replaced them with virulent opponents of the Jewish state… There haven’t been any public polls taken of Jewish voter sentiment since November, when Biden was widely viewed as the greatest friend Israel had ever had in Washington. But anecdotal evidence is piling up that the Jewish vote is in contention like it hasn’t been in more than 40 years. Moreover, American Jewish voters may well turn out to be the demographic that determines the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. READ MORE

JPOST Prominent Reform rabbi to Democrats: Don’t take American Jews for granted The Democratic Party should not take the vote of American Jews for granted in the US elections, prominent American Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch cautioned in a Friday sermon at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York…Hirsch said he had spoken to many American Jews in recent months who had expressed to him their anxiety about the Democratic Party, and their perception that it had not only become increasingly hostile against Israel but also tolerant of antisemitism and anti-Zionism within its ranks.

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Few Jews still believe the Jewish establishment has done a good job defending and protecting the community from the rhetorical onslaught against Israel that has morphed into a full-on assault against American Jewry

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Some in the Jewish establishment, even now, dilute our pro-Israel voice
Charles Jacobs
April 17, 2024

…From the start, the “establishment”—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federation system, the Jewish Community Relations Councils and many rabbis—failed to understand that the obsessive, intense, continuous “criticism of Israeli policies” that appeared almost daily in the media was a new form of antisemitism. They failed to defend Jewish students on campus who were intimidated and harassed by the leftist academia and then subjected to continuous vigorous attacks by woke student groups. The establishment told us to embrace all the leftist groups’ causes so that presumably these groups would reciprocate and have our backs, too. We followed this advice: We supported blacks and feminists, gays and Latinos, and even Muslims, and then all of them stabbed us in the back. To this day, neither local nor national establishment leaders have given an accounting of this colossal and perhaps lethal failure. Worse, they refuse to do a difficult rethink of the unthought-out policies that brought us all down to this dark alley where we seem to be dangerously trapped. READ MORE

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What’s old is new again: “In the 1990s, every time an Israeli built a room on a house on the West Bank, the settler policy was said to be “isolating” Israel from the international community”

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

COMMENTARY
Israel’s Splendid Isolation
John Podhoretz
May 2024

Six months into the war against Hamas, and we’re told Israel is more isolated than ever. But is it, though? Israel has been engaging in self-defense against marauding or rocket-firing Palestinians intermittently over the past 60 years. In almost every instance, the word “isolated” has been incessantly deployed in media to describe the Jewish state’s standing after it acts to protect its own people among the “world of nations” or the “international community”—or whatever descriptor you might wish to use for those people and nations discomfited not merely by the existence of the Jewish state but by its intermittent and potent displays of Jewish martial force. Pull back a little and view the relations of Israel with the rest of the world through a historical lens and you can see why the desire of the sclerotic “international community” to declare Israel isolated is without limit. READ MORE

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Possible arrest warrants for Israeli leaders expose the utter perversity of the ICC

Posted on May 2, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Now is the time for choosing
Caroline Glick
April 26, 2024

…Early this week, rumors began to swirl that ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan is poised to act on these groundless complaints [charging Israel with genocide] and issue international arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. If Khan proceeds as reported, Israel’s top leaders will be unable to visit any of the ICC’s 120 member nations without first securing bilateral agreements with authorities in each country not to arrest them during their stay. This is terrible in and of itself, of course. But the wider implication is even more dire. If Khan goes through with his plan, he will essentially declare Israel a criminal state with no right to self-defense. READ MORE

FDD Orde Kittrie: Possible arrest warrants for Israeli leaders expose the utter perversity of the International Criminal Court The perversity of targeting Israeli leaders for justly attempting, as any other nation would, to free the hostages and prevent future Hamas atrocities is precisely why two decades of US presidents, from both parties, have refused to join the International Criminal Court. Members of Congress from both parties are making clear that ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials — a move the court is reportedly considering — would end US cooperation with the ICC and result in US sanctions on ICC officials. Such warrants would be legally and factually baseless, endanger US personnel and torpedo negotiations to free the hostages and build Middle East peace.

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The Palestinian terror organization refuses to release hostages while clinging to its last stronghold in Rafah. So why is the Biden administration throwing the full weight of the U.S. government at Israel to prevent it from routing Hamas?

Posted on May 2, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Saving Hamas
Lee Smith
May 1, 2024

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army’s tunnels. READ MORE

CBS NEWS White House considers welcoming some Palestinians from war-torn Gaza as refugees The Biden administration is considering bringing certain Palestinians to the U.S. as refugees, a move that would offer a permanent safe haven to some of those fleeing war-torn Gaza, according to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News. In recent weeks, the documents show, senior officials across several federal U.S. agencies have discussed the practicality of different options to resettle Palestinians from Gaza who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents. One of those proposals involves using the decades-old United States Refugee Admissions Program to welcome Palestinians with U.S. ties who have managed to escape Gaza and enter neighboring Egypt, according to the inter-agency planning documents. READ MORE

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