Conflict Kitchen, a restaurant located near the campuses of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, features a menu that strictly serves dishes which are said to be from countries currently in conflict with the United States.
Although a state of Palestine has never actually existed, Conflict Kitchen has now seemingly made an exception to their mission and has featured Palestine as its current “focus country.” In the past, the controversial eatery has featured cuisine from North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Why the United States is viewed as a “conflict country” when it has donated billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, remains unclear.
In April, The eatery received a $50,000 grant from the Heinz Endowment, which is chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry, the billionaire wife of Secretary of State John Kerry.
One of the restaurant’s food wrappers excuses Palestinian terrorism as a legitimate means to combat Israel’s military superiority, which echoes the sentiments expressed by jihadi terrorist group Hamas.
The wrapper states: “”How can you compare Israeli F-16s, which are some of the best military planes in the world, to a few hundred homemade rockets? You’re pushing them (Palestinians) to the absolute extreme. So what do you expect?… Palestinians are not going to just let (Israel) in and drop their arms. No, they’re going to kill and they are going to die.”
Conflict Kitchen is co-directed by art professor Jon Rubin and former student Dawn Weleski.
Secretary of State John Kerry has come under fire during his tenure from pro-Israel voices who view him as extremely hostile to the Jewish state. Over the summer, Kerry warned that Israel could become an “apartheid” state if peace talks with the Palestinians failed. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) found the remarks offensive and called upon the Secretary to resign immediately.
Kerry has been a mainstay in Jerusalem and has pressured Israel and its people to continue to negotiate with radical interests—such as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, who do not grant the same rights and religious liberty to Jews as Israel does to Muslims within its borders.
In January, Israeli Defense MInister Moshe Yaalon said of Kerry: “Secretary of State John Kerry came here very determined and operates based upon an unfathomable obsession and a messianic feeling. Throughout the recent months, there is no negotiation between us and the Palestinians, but rather, between us and the Americans. The only thing that can ‘save’ us is that John Kerry will get a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone.”
Israeli border police near the entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on October 30, 2104. (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Israel’s closure of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, following an assassination attempt Wednesday, is tantamount to a “declaration of war,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday morning.
Abbas’s remarks came after a suspect in the shooting of a prominent right-wing Jewish activist was killed in a gunfight with the police in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor. Police closed the compound early Thursday out of fear of clashes in the wake of the shooting of Yehuda Glick, who campaigned for Jewish rights on the site, and as Israeli right-wing groups vowed to march on the site.
“This dangerous Israeli escalation is a declaration of war on the Palestinian people and its sacred places and on the Arab and Islamic nation,” his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina quoted him as saying.
The director of the Al-Aqsa Mosque called the site’s closure unacceptable.
“It is unacceptable that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is paying a toll for the events in Jerusalem,” he said.
“The mosque is a place for prayer and worship and all Muslims have the right to access it,” the director told the Ma’an news agency.
Israeli authorities turned back right-wing Likud MK Moshe Feiglin, who tried to make his way onto the Temple Mount Thursday morning in response to the shooting of Glick, a leader of the Temple Mount Faithful activist group.
Abbas spoke to Israel’s Channel 10 Wednesday evening, as the UN Security Council discussed the escalating violence in Jerusalem, and emphasized that “we don’t want an intifada. We aren’t calling for an intifada.”
“I told people frankly: these are our holy places and we want to protect them in a quiet fashion. Where is the tension in my words? I say we must protect them. You come to me and attack me and I say, stop attacking and nothing will happen. But Netanyahu, all his accusations are null.”
According to Abbas, Israel is responsible for fanning the flames of a third intifada. “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu forgot during these 50 days [of the summer’s military operation in Gaza] that not a single shot was fired from the West Bank. We don’t want an intifada. The Israeli media and many Israeli leaders are those who are asking [for it] and inciting a third intifada. We aren’t in favor of a third intifada.”
“What’s happening in Jerusalem is very grave. We don’t want matters to develop more than this. I say to the Israeli people: I don’t want advancement in blood, not in Jerusalem nor in other places. I want quiet negotiations,” he added. “What’s happening is incitement by the Israeli government. I went to the Security Council. Where will I go? When [they] attack me, I go to the Security Council.”
Mr. President, I am speaking to you on behalf of UN Watch.
Standing before you is Father Gabriel Naddaf, a Christian citizen from Nazareth, the city in which Christ was raised and where he proselytized.
Dear Sirs, while I stand before you today, the earth of the Middle East is soaked with the blood of Christians being killed daily.
Do you know that at the start of the 20th century, Christians comprised 20% of the population of the Middle East?
Today they comprise only 4%.
Do you know that over the past years some 100,000 Christians have been killed annually? And why? Not for a crime they’ve committed, but only for believing in Christ.
In Iraq alone, more than 77% of the Christians have fled during the year 2000, in addition to thousands killed and expelled.
Some 2 million Christians lived in Syria, but today, they are less than 250,000.
Christians in these countries are treated as second-class citizens; facing racial, religious, economic and social discrimination.
Why is this happening? Only due to their religion, a religion that advocates love and peace between mankind.
Christians in the Middle East are marginalized; their rights denied, their property stolen, their honor violated, their men killed, and their children displaced.
Where will they go? Who will defend them? And who will guard their property?
If we look at the Middle East, Mr. President, we realize there’s only one safe place where Christians are not persecuted.
One place where they are protected, enjoying freedom of worship and expression, living in peace and not subjected to killing and genocide.
It is Israel, the country I live in. The Jewish state is the only safe place where the Christians of the Holy Land live in safety.
Christians and Jews live in Israel not only because Christ was originally Jewish, born in Jewish Bethlehem, but because they share a common destiny, and a true hope to coexist in peace.
Does the world acknowledge Israel for protecting its Christians? Many in the international community have chosen to criticize Israel.
This, in my mind, is a double crime: because by doing so, the international community helps those striving to annihilate the Jews, the Christians, the Druze and the Yazidis for political ends.
By doing so, the international community unfortunately contributes to exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.
It causes Christians to leave the land of Christ searching for a safe haven across the world.
It is time for the world to awaken and realize the truth of those striving to destroy the Jewish state.
They are hastening the death sentence of Christians in the Middle East and the Holy Land, the land which witnessed the birth and life of our Lord Jesus Christ. If they leave, who will remain in it?
I, Father Gabrial Naddaf of Nazareth, stand before you and plead: O world leaders and supporters of peace, stop those who want to destroy the only free Jewish state in the region.
It is the only refuge welcoming and protecting all of its citizens. It is the only place that does not attempt to push out Christians, forcing them to leave their land in search of security.
I implore you from the bottom of my heart to hear the cry of the Christians of the Middle East before it is too late, and you may read about them only in the history books.
(This is what happens when the police are politicised and are more concerned about preventing Jewish “provocations” than in apprehending their Arab attackers — AP)
Terrorist deliberately targets leading advocate for Jewish Temple Mount rights, leaving Glick seriously injured.
Yehuda Glick, a leading advocate for Jewish rights on the Temple Mount, has been very seriously wounded after being shot in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, Arutz Sheva has learned.
Glick was shot outside the Begin Heritage center in the capital, witnesses said, after a terrorist pulled up in a scooter or motorcycle and shot him before fleeing the scene.
Initial reports are indicating that Glick – who founded and heads the LIBA Initiative for Jewish Freedom on the Temple Mount – was deliberately targeted for nationalistic reasons, but police have not yet officially announced a motive.
The Begin Center had been hosting an event to help in efforts to re-establish a greater Jewish presence on the Mount Wednesday night, just before the activist was shot.
He has been rushed to Sha’arei Tzedek Medical Center for immediate medical treatment.
Magen David Adom (MDA) spokesman Zaki Heller said that Glick was shot in the upper body no fewer than three times and paramedics had barely had time to speak to him during the initial stages of treatment.
Activists have asked that prayers be said for the urgent recovery of Yehuda Yehoshua ben Rivka Ita Breindel.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) are currently at the scene.
The Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, but under pressure from Islamist groups including the Jordanian-run Waqf Islamic trust, Jews are forbidden to worship there under pain of arrest.
Glick has been an ardent opponent of the current status-quo on the Mount, which Jewish groups have condemned as discriminatory. Numerous Israeli court decisions have backed their claims – only for police to invoke “security concerns” as a way of circumventing the courts and maintaining a blanket ban on Jewish worship there.
Watch: Arutz Sheva TV joins Glick on Temple Mount tour:
Watch: Glick implores Jews to stand up for Temple Mount (2012)
Much of the recent Arab violence in Jerusalem has centered around the Temple Mount, with Islamist and Palestinian Authority leaders branding Jewish visitors to the site as “invaders” and “settlers”, and Muslim worshippers harassing and even physically attacking them. Islamist rioters have also been frequently clashing with Israeli police at the site.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas recently made a public effort to fan the flames of violence, urging Palestinians to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount using “all means” necessary.
Abbas’s comments have been replayed well over a dozen times on official PA TV – part of what appears to be a calculated campaign to incite more violence in the capital.
There is no doubt that Obama’s lame duck years will be stressful for Israel and its friends. As Seth noted earlier today, the administration’s full court press for détente with Iran is setting the table for a strategic blunder on their nuclear quest that will severely harm the balance of power in the Middle East as well as lay the groundwork for challenges to American national security for decades to come.
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No doubt the gang in the Obama administration have been congratulating themselves for planting some juicy insults aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest column in The Atlantic. But now that the wiseacres in the West Wing and/or the State Department have done their dirty work the question remains what will be the consequences of the decision to widen as well as to embitter the breach between the two countries. While most of those writing on this subject, including Goldberg, have emphasized the real possibility that the U.S. will sandbag Israel at the United Nations and otherwise undermine the Jewish state’s diplomatic position in the last years of Obama’s term in office, that won’t be the only blowback from the administration’s “chickenshit” diplomacy. Rather than harm Netanyahu, this ploy, like previous attacks on the prime minister, will strengthen him while making mischief for the president’s party in both this year’s midterms and in 2016.
There is no doubt that Obama’s lame duck years will be stressful for Israel and its friends. As Seth noted earlier today, the administration’s full court press for détente with Iran is setting the table for a strategic blunder on their nuclear quest that will severely harm the balance of power in the Middle East as well as lay the groundwork for challenges to American national security for decades to come.
Nor should anyone discount the potential for severe damage to Israel’s diplomatic standing in the world should Obama decide to collude with the Palestinian Authority and to allow them to get a United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood, borders, and Jerusalem. The Palestinians’ drive to annul Jewish rights and to bypass the peace process could, with Obama’s support, further isolate Israel and strengthen the efforts of those forces working to promote BDS—boycott, divest, sanction—campaigns that amount to an economic war on the Jewish people.
This is a dire prospect for a small, besieged country that still relieves heavily on U.S. security cooperation and defense aid. But for all the huffing and puffing on the part of Obama’s minions, the administration’s real objectives in all this plotting are not likely to be achieved. That’s because nothing published in a Goldberg column or leaked anywhere else will weaken Netanyahu’s hold on office or prompt the Palestinians to make peace or Iran to be more reasonable in the nuclear talks. The only people who will be hurt by the attacks on Israel are Obama’s fellow Democrats.
As I pointed out yesterday, Obama’s barbs aimed at Israel haven’t enticed the Palestinians to negotiate seriously in the past and won’t do so in the future. If the Palestinian Authority really wanted a state they would have accepted the one offered them in 2000, 2001, or 2008 or actually negotiated with Netanyahu in the last year after he indicated readiness to sign off on a two-state solution.
The boasts about having maneuvered Netanyahu into a position where he may not have a viable military option against Iran (actually, Israel may never have had much of an option since it can be argued that only U.S. possesses the forces required to conclusively knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities) is also nothing for the U.S. to be happy about since it will only strengthen the Iranians’ conviction that they have nothing to fear from Israel or a U.S. president that they think is too weak to stand up to them.
But Obama should have also already learned that challenging Netanyahu and insulting the Jewish state in this manner has one definite side effect: strengthening the prime minister’s political position at home. The same thing happened after Obama’s attacks on the status of Jerusalem in his first term. The administration thought it could topple Netanyahu soon after his election in February 2009 and failed, but even after his election to another term in 2013 as well as the absence of any viable alternative to him, they are still clinging to the delusion that the Israeli people will reject his policies. But that isn’t likely to happen for one reason. The overwhelming majority of Israelis may not love the prime minister but they share his belief that there is no Palestinian peace partner and that turning the West Bank into a sovereign state that could be controlled by Hamas and other terrorists just like Gaza would be madness. They also oppose efforts to divide their capital or to prohibit Jews from the right to live in some parts of the city.
Netanyahu won’t back down. In the wake of the summer war with Hamas that further undermined an Israeli left that was already in ruins after 20 years of failed peace processing, Netanyahu was clearly heading to early elections that would further strengthen the Likud. Obama’s attacks will only make that strategy more attractive to the prime minister. But whether he is reelected in 2015, 2016, or 2017, few believe Netanyahu won’t be returned to office by the voters for his third consecutive and fourth overall term as Israel’s leader. Though a lot of damage can be done to Israel in the next two years, that means Netanyahu is almost certain to be able to outlast Obama in office and to enjoy what will almost certainly be better relations with his successor whether it is a Democrat or a Republican. Waiting out Obama isn’t a good strategy for Israel but it may be the only one it has available to it and will likely be rewarded with a honeymoon with the next president.
But Netanyahu isn’t the only person who will profit politically from this astonishingly crude assault on the Jewish state’s democratically elected leader.
Foreign policy is rarely a decisive factor in U.S. elections but at a time when Democrats are suffering the ill effects of Obama’s inept response to the threat from ISIS, it won’t do the president’s party any good for the administration to pick a fight with it’s sole democratic ally in the Middle East. Americans have a right to ask why an administration that was slow to react to ISIS and is intent on appeasing a murderous Islamist regime in Iran is so intent on fighting with Israel. That won’t help embattled Democrats seeking reelection in red states where evangelicals regard backing for Israel as a key issue.
Nor will it help Democrats as they head toward 2016. Though Hillary Clinton will likely run away from Obama on his attacks on Netanyahu as she has done on other foreign-policy issues, running for what will in effect be Obama’s third term will still burden her with the need to either actively oppose the president’s anti-Israel actions in the UN or détente with Iran or accept the negative political fallout of silence. Any Republican, with the exception of an isolationist like Rand Paul, will be able to exploit this issue to their advantage.
Those who worry about the damage to Israel from a lame-duck Obama administration that is seething with hatred for Netanyahu and thinks it has nothing to lose are not wrong. But Democrats will be hurt politically by a crisis that was created by Obama, not Netanyahu. They won’t be grateful to the president for having put them in this fix while Netanyahu will probably emerge from this trial strengthened at home and in a good position to repair relations with Obama’s successor.
The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
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Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.
The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst onto the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.
The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.
They demand it with words and boycotts, but the Muslim settlers on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem are writing their murderous demands with the blood of little girls.
The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house, and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.
Like Chaya, I was born in Jerusalem. Like Yaffa, I lived in a building targeted by Muslim snipers. But the Six Day War had ended the reign of Muslim snipers over the city. The building where my parents made their home had been cheap once because living there could mean instant death for anyone looking out of a window at the wrong time. The liberation and reunification of Jerusalem had made it a place where Jewish children could play on balconies and Christians could repair churches without being murdered.
Under Muslim occupation, while Jordanian snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put up an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local Jewish residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.
It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.
Muslim outrage over Jewish outhouses mattered more than the Muslim murder of Jewish children. It still does. Today the State Department calls the murder of that little girl a traffic incident while warning that Jews living in Jerusalem will end any possibility of peace.
Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes shrieking at Netanyahu over the phone after a planning committee allowed new housing in Jerusalem to advance to the public comment stage, and told the media that the proposal that Jews live in a part of Jerusalem that she believes should belong to Muslims is “insulting” to the United States.
The latest firestorm exploded over seven Jewish families moving into homes that they had bought legally in an area from which Jews had been ethnically cleansed by racist Muslim violence in the twenties and thirties. Earlier the State Department and White House had warned that Israel was alienating “even its closest allies” by proposing to build houses on Airplane Hill, a place mainly known for having an Israeli plane crash there during the Six Day War that had formerly hosted temporary housing for Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.
Meanwhile when Chaya was murdered, the State Department urged “all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident.” It wasn’t as if anything important had happened. Just an Israeli-American baby murdered in pursuit of their shared goal of Islamizing Jerusalem.
Secretary of State John Kerry did not call President Abbas, the unelected president of the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, to berate him when one of his advisers called the murderer of that child a “heroic martyr”. Hillary Clinton did not come out of retirement to shriek at him over the phone when his party suggested that the killer would be receiving his 72 virgins in paradise.
If only something more important had happened than a presidential advisor to an Obama-backed terror state calling the murderer of an American child a hero; like planning for new housing “advancing”.
No one objects when Muslim settlers build houses in Jerusalem or anywhere else. But the objections pour in when the indigenous Jewish population builds so much as a house or an outhouse.
What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers.
“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”
In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”
Life magazine published photos of the atrocity writing that, “Muslim censors, not only in Palestine but in neighboring Arab countries which have major communication outlets, tried for a fortnight to keep the news from leaking out.”
The Life photographer who took the photos was sentenced to death by the Arab High Committee.
This ethnic cleansing is what Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have been defending. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the thrust of all the peace plans put forward.
The entire phony “Palestinian” narrative in which the regional Sunni Arab Muslim majority that is busy slaughtering Christians, Kurds, Shiites acts as if it’s the victim because its racist ethnic cleansing plans were frustrated when its Jewish victims fought back and won.
The Muslim occupiers have added insult to injury by pretending to be the indigenous population to aid in their attempts at displacing the indigenous Jewish population through terror and lies.
Abdullah el-Talal said, “I have seen in this defeat of the Jews the heaviest blow rendered upon them, especially in terms of morale, since they were evicted from the Western Wall and from the Jewish Quarter, for the first time in fifteen generations.”
Every politician denouncing Jews for building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.
The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
Too many governments still stand with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamizing Jerusalem.
Those politicians who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibility for the crimes of the Islamizers.
I have documented academic anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on occasion, but my focus was more on the anti-Israel activity against Jewish and Israeli academics and institutions, including boycotts. I have not really focussed on campus antisemitism against Jewish and pro-Israel students.
It was therefore shocking, if not unexpected, to see this horrifying video produced by Jewish Voices on Campus (via Arlene Kushner):
Staged “checkpoint” at a campus Israel Apartheid Week event
The Anti-Defamation League issued an important report on Monday, Oct. 27, finding a dramatic increase in anti-Israel activity, compared to last year. The ADL attributes the increase to the aftermath of the 50-day Gaza war this past summer.
According to the ADL, this fall semester there have already been 75 anti-Israel events reported on U.S. college campuses. In the same period last year, there were only 35 such events.
The problem is even more alarming than the ADL’s report suggests.
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William Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and founder and publisher of the excellent blog covering legal matters, especially anti-Israel activity on campuses, Legal Insurrection, made the point:
“It is no real surprise that anti-Israel groups are trying to leverage the summer’s fighting in Gaza to their advantage on campus.
“But that is just the latest excuse for what has been a long-running campus propaganda war against Israel. If it was not Gaza it would have been something else. There are groups always looking for an excuse to attack Israel on campus,” Jacobson explained.
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METHODS OF CAMPUS ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVITIES
Those campus anti-Israel activities include mock “Apartheid Walls” intended to represent Israel’s passive security barrier as a weapon of racism; mock checkpoints in which anti-Israel thugs act out the role of Israeli security forces intimidating, harassing and aggressively demanding identification from hapless and often helpless students who are forced into playing the role of meek and innocent Palestinian Arabs, and fake “die-ins.”
There are also the mock eviction notices slipped under the dorm room doors of students. These notices demand the students leave their rooms, pretending that the evil Israeli empire is confiscating their dwelling space. Although there is (at least now) a line usually at the bottom of the notice, informing the student that the eviction notice is not real, the level of anxiety it creates is real, as is the feeling of students having their private space violated.
These tactics, along with the Israel divestment resolutions (all of purely symbolic value as students cannot vote on how a university’s money is invested, but the platform provided to bash Israel can be deeply upsetting nonetheless) and activities promoting the boycott of, divestment from and sanctions against (BDS) movement have metastasized. In the past few years several large academic organizations have focused a great deal of time and energy on whether to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
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Jacobson, another observer in the front row, agreed with the ADL that most campuses in the U.S. do not experience problems with openly hostile anti-Israel activity. But, Jacobson explains, “that is not for lack of trying. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, often with the assistance and encouragement of anti-Israel faculty, have become more aggressive in the past two years.”
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By whatever standard is used, there is little doubt that the problem of orchestrated anti-Israel activity on U.S. campuses is growing and needs to be taken seriously.
And it is not a new phenomenon. As long ago as 2009, after spending two weeks on a speaking tour of North American colleges, Arab Israeli journalist Khaled abu Toameh had this to say about the anti-Israel climate on those campuses: “there is more sympathy for Hamas there than in Ramallah.”
Read the whole article for a depressing and alarming insight into what is happening in US academia.
In the UK matters are at least as bad. The Stand With Us organization does sterling work in countering academic boycotts, BDS in general, and defending Israel in various forums. Of course many individuals (e.g. Ronnie Fraser) have confronted anti-Israel boycott proposals by teachers’ unions like the UCU, often to the detriment of their own career.
A scene from Manchester’s Say No to Anti-Semitism rally on Sunday, October 19,2014. (Mike Poloway)
Even by the standards of British student politics, the campus-wide vote due to take place from October 24-31 at the University of Manchester is most questionable and controversial.
The proposal being put to vote is to renew the university student union’s twinning partnership with An-Najah National University in Nablus, a place called by Hamas “a greenhouse for martyrs.”
According to Jewish watchdog organization the Anti-Defamation League, “the student council of An-Najah is known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups. The council, almost completely controlled by factions loyal to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, glorifies suicide bombings and propagandizes for jihad against Israel.”
Unsurprisingly, students connected with Manchester’s Jewish society oppose the motion.
In London’s Jewish News, James Graham wrote that he and other Jewish students supported the proposal’s motion to bring a student from a Palestinian university to study in Manchester.
“What we as a J-Soc [Jewish student union] were opposed to is the twinning with An-Najah, an institution with links to Hamas and that has publicly called for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Instead we were in favor of a three-way relationship between Manchester, an Israeli university and an alternative Palestinian one,” Graham wrote.
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What is witnessed in wider society is not reflected proportionally on campus, but rather boiled down and concentrated. Organized student politics, as a result, can appear radical or extreme on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The NUS – a national confederation of 600 student unions in Britain representing the interests of more than seven million students – backed 23 votes to 18 to commit itself to “ensuring that, as far as is practical, NUS does not employ or work with companies identified as facilitating Israel’s military capacity, human rights abuses or illegal settlement activity, and to actively work to cut ties with those that do,” a spokesperson said at the time.
But the motion went further than that. Support for BDS was tagged to a motion which condemned “Israel’s attacks on Gaza” and “the collective punishment and killing in Gaza,” and backed calls to lift the blockade on the Strip. It also beseeched the British government to cease aid and funding to Israel and impose an arms embargo against Israel,according to Cherwell, a student newspaper of Oxford University.
Anti-Israel demonstration in London during the Gaza war summer 2014
This would not be in the NUS’ only intervention in the Middle East. Earlier this month, the National Executive Committee blocked a motion to “condemn the IS and support the Kurdish forces fighting against it, while expressing no confidence or trust in the US military intervention” and “campaign in solidarity with the Iraqi people and in particular support the hard-pressed student, workers’ and women’s organizations against all the competing nationalist and religious-right forces.”
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Decisions such as these — condemning Israel, but not Islamic extremists — have set a tone for political activity in other students’ unions across the country. At Goldsmiths, University of London, the students’ union voted down a motion to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, among other anniversaries of genocides and atrocities in Europe, including the Armenian genocide. The motion read in part:
The Student Union recognizes the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, of the other genocides, of totalitarianism and racial hatred. It further recognizes that commemorating the victims of genocide, racial hatred and totalitarianism, and promoting public awareness of these crimes against humanity, is essential to sustaining and defending democratic culture and civil society, especially in the face of a resurgence of neo-fascism, racial hatred and neo-Stalinism across Europe.
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Meanwhile at Cambridge…
At the University of Cambridge, a collective of doctors and professors put their names to a September 28 statement which demanded an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip and “a more far-reaching justice for the Palestinian people, including the displaced refugees.” This change, they argued, “without an end to the violence perpetrated by the State of Israel against Palestinians, an end to the siege of Gaza and to the occupation, and an end to the discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian citizens within Israel.”
Students at the university connected to the Israel Society issued a counter-letter, condemning the academics for “demonstrating a severe lack of nuance surrounding the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and for issuing an un-academic statement that achieves little save establishing the desire to discriminate against a sole nationality.”
The original letter, however, asserted that Israel “singles itself out” for criticism “through its claims to moral impeccability, its celebrated status as a democracy, through its receipt of massive support from the US and other nations, and through its abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to deflect criticism and to discredit the Palestinian struggle.”
Joshua Gertner, co-president of Cambridge’s Israel Society and one of the authors of the counter-letter, told The Times of Israel, “This eye-opening letter from the student body rightly highlights the lack of nuance from these Cambridge academics in their strikingly un-academic torrent of criticism leveled at Israel. It was very important to send a strong message that their unhelpful and misguided sentiment is not blindly accepted by their students.”
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In explaining this raft of extremely politicized decisions by the NUS and other students’ unions, Daniel Cooper – one of the co-sponsors of the motion to condemn ISIS – argued that “there is a stranglehold of ‘identity politics’ on the student movement.” He added that “the idea is widespread that if a Liberation Officer opposes something, it must be bad.”
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Some “appear not to research issues, work out what they think, engage and take ideas forward. Instead, some are not very interested and vote on basis of who they want to ally with.
In other words many British students are dimwits who vote with their emotions without studying the facts first. Exactly how a university student should NOT behave in fact.
However it is not all bad news, though the good news are few and far between.
The president of the University of Liege in Belgium said he was “appalled” at philosophy students for staging a mock Gaza-themed initiation ritual of newcomers.
The invitation to the event, scheduled for Tuesday, was couched in an anti-Semitic language, reading ‘’your goal is to avoid the big bad Jew,” according to the European Jewish Press..
…
University’s president Albert Corhay demanded the cancellation of the event and added that students involved will be summoned in the coming days.
In a statement, the Union of Jewish Students in Belgium declared: “The student body has a tradition of humorous initiations. Here, however, we are dealing with something else: a Manichaean and anti-Semitic vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Kol hakavod to Mr. Corhay for having the courage to stand up to these bigots and for imposing a modicum of decency in his university. If only British deans adn professors woudl act likewise.
On Friday afternoon, the Doctoral Students Council of the City University of New York (CUNY) once again considered a hateful resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
After the same measure was defeated by 41 votes last month, this destructive and divisive resolution once again reared its ugly head. For a second time, the resolution failed to win passage, receiving 31 out of a required 39 votes.
The hypocrites who promoted the resolution are part of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This well-funded and increasingly organized campaign seeks to isolate, demonize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state of Israel.
The resolution’s backers claimed they were promoting justice and human rights, that they were seeking sovereignty and freedom for the Palestinian people, that they are trying to end the “occupation.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
…
Sensible students and faculty at CUNY organized to stand up for academic freedom and moral integrity by helping defeat this resolution. They were supported by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, StandWithUs, The Third Narrative, The Israel Project, and an on-site rapid response team from Israel on Campus Coalition.
Kol hakavod to all the students and the pro-Israel advocacy groups who supported them in their tireless efforts to defeat this bigoted motion.
Unfortunately, as we have seen in the above article, being defeated once, or even twice, is not enough to deter the bigots and Jew-haters. I’m sure they will raise their ugly heads again in further boycott attempts and anti-Jewish events. We all have to stand guard and give support to the Jewish students and faculty.
IDF Northern Commander: ‘Hezbollah Likely Has Terror Tunnels’After playing down threat, IDF acknowledges likelihood of attack tunnels from Lebanon, warning ‘can’t use Iron Dome there.’
A senior IDF commander on Wednesday acknowledged to Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) that the Iran-proxy terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon has likely dug terror tunnels into Israel.
IDF Northern Commander Maj. Gen. Yair Golan equivocated by noting on Hamas’s use of terror tunnels, saying “we have no positive information meaning that there are tunnels. The situation is not similar to what there was around the Gaza Strip,” reports Reuters.
“That said, this idea of going below ground is not foreign to Lebanon and is not foreign to Hezbollah and so we have to suppose as a working assumption that there are tunnels. These have to be looked for and prepared for,” revealed Golan.
Golan in August responded to northern citizens, who reported hearing digging sounds under their homes and seeing cement mixers and construction trucks carting out earth on the Lebanese side under the cover of greenhouse structures, by saying the IDF hadn’t found Hezbollah terror tunnels – yet.
While the IDF has been playing down the northern tunnel threat, IDF sources have reported to Arutz Sheva that the army is covertly conducting an investigation of the threat.
The usage of similar attack tunnels by Syrian rebels in their fight against President Bashar Assad in rocky terrain similar to that found along the Israeli-Lebanese border has proven the feasibility of a Hezbollah tunnel attack.
“We won’t be able to use Iron Dome”
Golan warned that with Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal – thought to be ten times more powerful than that of Hamas – and the high elevations and inclinations, “we will not be able to provide the umbrella that was provided in the south by Iron Dome.”
“We and Hezbollah are conducting a kind of mutual-deterrence balance. There is no absolute deterrence. Each side has its pain threshold, its restraint threshold, which when passed prompt it to take action,” assessed Golan.
The statements comes after Hezbollah terrorists wounded two IDF soldiers earlier in the month with explosives set along the border. Security sources warned Israel may be in danger of “losing control” of the Lebanese border, after one IDF source caused a panic last month by warning Hezbollah could hypothetically invade parts of the Galilee for “several hours.”
American and Arab officials likewise revealed this week that US President Barack Obama’s administration has been cozying up to Hezbollah, along with Iran and Hamas, by providing intelligence information and using backdoor communication channels.
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