HILCO REAL ESTATE ANNOUNCES TWO COMMERCIAL CONDOMINIUMS AVAILABLE THROUGH A BANKRUPTCY SALE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
Hilco Real Estate, LLC, announces May 17, 2024 as the bid deadline for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy sale of two commercial condominiums in New York City’s historic Greenwich Village. These condominiums occupy the first and second floor of the building located at 350-354 Avenue of the Americas. With 176 feet of prime, wraparound frontage on the corner of 6th Avenue and Washington Place, these offerings promise high visibility and heavy foot traffic.
The ground-floor retail space, totaling over 7,850± square feet and zoned C1, boasts 15-foot ceilings, exceptional location and can accommodate single or multiple tenants. While currently not built out, the versatile layout can be retrofitted, taking advantage of three separate entry points, which present a unique opportunity for various uses.
The second-floor space, spanning 8,942± square feet and zoned C2, offers ample flexibility for community-oriented endeavors. Previously occupied by a daycare, the space retains its built-out infrastructure, providing a turnkey solution for a new operator. This setup can also offer potential investors the ability to combine both floors and potentially increase the value for a prospective tenant.
The condominiums sit just one block from Washington Square Park and four blocks from NYU, ideally positioned to take advantage of excellent foot traffic. Additionally, eight subway lines, including the A, C, E, B, D, F, M and 1, and the PATH train are within walking distance, ensuring easy accessibility for both employees and customers.
Greenwich Village, on the west side of Lower Manhattan, is known for its history of fostering art and creativity, with notable former residents including Edgar Allen Poe, Jackson Pollack and Bob Dylan. The neighborhood also features multiple attractions, including Washington Square Park, the Village Vanguard jazz club, the Comedy Cellar, the historic Jefferson Market Library and several historic districts dedicated to preserving the Village’s character and charm. In addition to being lauded for its creative culture, Greenwich Village is home to New York University (NYU), The New School and Cooper Union, with over 64,000 students in attendance between the three universities. Despite the pandemic, the neighborhood also saw a 1.85% population increase from 2020 to 2021 and a 4.29% increase in median household income.
The sale of 350-354 Avenue of the Americas is being conducted by Order of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court District of the Southern District of New York (Manhattan), Bankruptcy Petition No. 23-10068-JPM, In re: Nuovo Ciao-Di LLC. Bids must be received on or before the deadline of May 17 at 5 p.m. (ET) and must be submitted on the Purchase and Sale Agreement available for review and download from Hilco Real Estate’s website.
Interested buyers should review the requirements in order to participate in the bankruptcy sale process available on Hilco Real Estate’s website. For further information, please contact Jonathan Cuticelli at (203) 561-8737 or [email protected].
(Breitbart) Tensions rose when anti-Israel protesters with the group Queers for Palestine blocked traffic on Saturday outside Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Protesters used their cars to block the exit at Interstate 4, the New York Post reported Sunday. Video footage shows several of them standing behind the vehicles and holding banners, one of which read “Free Palestine” and had what appeared to be a Mickey Mouse image on it.
For those that are interested, here is the full live stream of the Central Florida Queers for Palestine direct action, where they blocked the road right before the exit to Disney World in Orland, Florida. pic.twitter.com/7DoLtfgVnX
“Free, free, free Palestine!” the protesters yell as cars honk in the background:
The group has claimed that Disney supports “genocide,” and the protesters also screamed, “No more money for Israel’s crimes!”
Some drivers moved onto the shoulder to bypass the demonstrators and be on their way, but others chose to confront them. One man got out of his blue SUV to talk to them as they yelled:
In another clip, he tells the protesters they are losing people to their cause because of such demonstrations. “Fuck you, get out of the road,” one protester tells him.
One Dad was not having it that Central Florida Queers for Palestine was blocking the exit to Disney World.
The terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and war between them has raged since then.
“In addition to claiming that Disney supports Israel without ‘acknowledging the loss of Palestinian lives in the ongoing genocide,’ Queers for Palestine also blasted the company for introducing an Israeli superhero in 2025’s ‘Captain America: Brave New World,’” the Post article said.
NEW: The “Queers For Palestine” protesters who blocked the highway exit to Disney World in Orlando, FL, have been arrested by Florida Highway Patrol. I’m told they were arrested within 11 minutes.
Florida continues w/ zero tolerance for blocking traffic.
During the demonstration, law enforcement arrived 11 minutes after it began and arrested three protesters with Queers for Palestine, according to the outlet.
“Florida continues w/ zero tolerance for blocking traffic,” Fox News’s Bill Melugin wrote in a social media post that featured images of officers making the arrests:
In April, anti-Israel protesters blocked a major roadway into Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport which caused a snarl of traffic and extreme frustration, Breitbart News reported.
Some travelers were forced to walk the rest of the way to the airport to make their flights on time.
Meanwhile, Palestine activists protested the annual remembrance of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps on Monday, per Breitbart News.
The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres lambasted Israel in the aftermath of the Jenin operation. Credit: Facebook
JNS)
The United Nations now claims that “the fog of war” is to blame for a major overstatement of the number of Gazan children who have been killed in the war.
In mid-March, the U.N. Children’s Fund stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF, said in a television interview on March 17 that those numbers were “staggering” and “really shocking.”
“We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” Russell claimed at the time.
The statistic was cited frequently in the international press, leading to accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, including targeting babies and children intentionally.
Even Hamas has since admitted that those numbers turn out to be off by at least 40%. The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation.
“When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but rather to immediately seize on any report, no matter how unsubstantiated or even manifestly false, in order to portray Israel as malevolent,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS.
“The right thing for the U.N. to do now would be to admit that their casualty count in Gaza is a complete failure,” Neuer added.
Last Wednesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released updated casualty figures. Some 7,797 Gazan children had died in the war as of April 30, it said—a roughly 42% drop from the mid-March numbers.
It also revised its casually figures for women by nearly a half—from more than 9,500 to fewer than 5,000.
In a little-noticed change, OCHA differentiated in its new figures between “reported” and “identified” fatalities, including the 7,797 children figure in the “identified” category.
Utilizing OCHA’s math, out of 10,158 reported but unidentified casualties, 5,653 (56%) would have to be children to add up to the figures published in mid-March. That would be far more than is indicated by the information the United Nations released last week, which claims that children make up 32% of the identified deaths in Gaza.
JNS asked Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, at a press conference on Friday why the math doesn’t add up.
“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” Haq told JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar and author and HonestReporting board member, told JNS that “It’s absolutely true that the fog of war makes it difficult to assess casualties, but this was the case from the beginning of the war.”
“It’s outrageous that only seven months later, the U.N. is questioning the Hamas-supplied casualty numbers,” he said.
In early April, the Gaza Health Ministry said it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claimed to have documented at the time. The ministry later said it did not have names for more than 10,000 of the Gazans it claimed were killed in the war.
The ministry has not revealed publicly how it compiles its published information. No independent media exists in Gaza to try to verify it.
“For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method and no standard of proof,” Neuer told JNS. “All the U.N. does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which is laundered and legitimized by the U.N. as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office, when in fact both are run by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
“Now that the U.N. has suddenly reduced some of the figures by half, they’ve essentially admitted to have been feeding the media and the world completely false numbers,” he said.
As recently as last month, the Hamas-run government media office has repeated claims that 70% of the deceased were women and children.
Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS that “Numbers get adjusted many times over the course of a conflict. Once a conflict is done, we’ll have the most accurate figures.”
But Aizenberg’s research has shown that “For many months, there have been obvious errors identified in the numbers published daily by OCHA, which are ultimately based on Hamas reporting,” the scholar told JNS.
Aizenberg pointed to an immediate claim by Hamas of nearly 500 deaths in an Oct. 17 strike on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, which turned out to be a Palestinian rocket misfire and evidence suggests a drastically-lower death total. Still, Hamas hasn’t corrected its initial tally.
His analysis has also revealed that Hamas reported in the first months of the war that more women and children were killed than the total number of all fatalities.
“We’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are,” Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS on Friday.
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a statistical analysis two months ago that showed how Hamas faked casualty numbers.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy also released a report in January showing major discrepancies in the fatality reports, concluding they were most likely caused by manipulation.
“While it’s better late than never that the U.N. finally admits that the casualty numbers issued by Hamas for the last 200 days are not reliable, the false data has infiltrated everywhere,” Aizenberg told JNS.
He cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s claim in his March 7 State of the Union address that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.”
The U.S. State and Defense Departments have also used that statistic officially, apparently relying on Hamas data.
Neuer told JNS that “If U.N. officials continue to legitimize a Hamas-run system that has now proven itself to be completely false, they will be complicit with terrorist propaganda.”
The revised Hamas casualty numbers, taken together with Israel Defense Forces claims of terrorists killed—a distinction Hamas does not make—“demonstrate that the civilian/casualty rate in Gaza is likely 1:1 or lower, which would amount to the lowest ratio in the history of urban combat, starkly contradicting any notion of indiscriminate IDF attacks,” Aizenberg told JNS.
JNS asked Haq on Friday if U.N. figures can be considered reliable.
“You can consider them reliable from the fact that we’re continually checking them,” he said. “We’ll continue to do that over the course of the war. But the numbers, you know, ultimately have to be regularly checked so that we can be sure that what we’re putting out is valid.”
In Jan. 2014, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced it had stopped updating the death toll from Syria’s civil war, as it could no longer verify the sources of information.
In a few weeks, the media spotlight will be on the parade of western heads of state gathered at Normandy beaches to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-day. June 6 will be filled with speeches, reflections, and recollections. There will be op-eds on how the world has changed since the end of WW2, Germany turning from Nazism to democracy, Russia becoming an enemy instead of an ally.
And I wonder whether another parallel will be drawn — between Allied invasion across the English channel eighty years ago, and Israel’s operation in Rafah today.
Probably not — but not because of the vast difference in the scale of the two operations: Rafah is being watched today by the world with the same, if not greater, absorbing passion as was the D-Day eighty years ago. Yet contrasts abound, though the significance of both events is very similar: the D-Day sealed the fate of the Nazi Germany; while the fighting would continue for almost another year, the war’s final outcome was no longer in doubt. Having to fight on two fronts, Nazis had no chance of prevailing. The theater in which they could operate was contracting; the areas of supply of war materiel was getting smaller and smaller. The same is true of the Rafah operation: take Rafah, and not only will the remaining Hamas battalions be crushed, but the route for the bulk of Hamas’ weaponry — the underground tunnels connecting Gaza with Egypt — will be choked off. Bereft of resupply of arms, Hamas will dwindle, and gradually become exhausted and disappear as a fighting and therefore, governing, force.
The contrasts between 1944 and 2024 are stark. Pro-Nazi rhetoric that was heard in a portion of America’s German-speaking community before the WW2 was, by 1944, a thing of the long-forgotten past. There were no protests at MIT and Harvard and Columbia demanding the end of the war, there were no encampments festooned with signs like “No to Second Front!” “Let Berlin live!” FDR kept pumping the war materiel into both England and the Soviet Union non-stop, and Eisenhower was not pulling his punches: RAF’s bombing raids of Germany alternated with those by American bomber squadrons. Everyone knew that the country was at war with people who turned into monsters, either voluntarily, or through government’s coercion. Yes, many innocents — children including — were being killed in Germany, yet everyone knew who was to blame: not FDR, but Hitler.
What a difference eighty years makes! America is unrecognizable. A wave of pro-Hamas sentiment swept over the US. In Dearborn, Michigan, the heartland of Arab-American population, Hamas supporters demand that America stops supplying arms to Israel because its war on Hamas hurts Palestinian women and children. Ditto the ignorant “progressive” college professors and their empty-headed big-mouthed students ensconced in campus encampments. Ditto the “progressives” in Congress. Ditto much of the press. To them, Israel rather than Hamas personifies genocidal wishes and practices.
And Biden listens — and obliges. No FDR, he does not talk to the country in “fireside chats,” calming the nerves and explaining that Hamas has under arms some 40,000 terrorist thugs, plus another 40,000 apparatchics, who deliberately push their wives and kids into harms way as human shields — so the numbers of Palestinian casualties should be expected to be proportionate and taken is stride, and that rather than rending its hair in loud lamentations and pushing their governments into demanding that Israel should stop, the Western public should demand that Hamas unconditionally releases all hostages, steps out of its tunnels and surrenders. Instead of being a modern FDR, Biden follows, rather than leads, playing Hamas’ game in gnashing his teeth over deaths of the accomplices to Hamas terrorism, and pausing arms shipments to Israel. His generals, no modern Eisenhowers either, are echoing their Commander-in-Chief in claiming that Rafah operation needs not happen.
If in 1944 Biden rather than FDR was America’s president, if today’s generals and not Eisenhower were commanding US forces back then, if Americans of German ancestry would have behaved the way the Arab-Americans do today, if college students loudly protested the war, if the press was pitying the Nazis rather than their victims, if there were doubts that Nazism as such could be defeated (because Nazism was an “idea” after all, it was a “social movement” — and ideas and social movements are indestructible, we are being told by today’s talking heads who insist that Israelis are headed for a failure if their goal is eradicating Hamas — though how those same talking heads are able to claim in the same breath that the Palestinians who are inflamed by Hamas’ “indestructible idea” of destroying Israel and, in eagerly participating in Hamas’ “social movement,” are getting killed while serving as Hamas’ human shields are “innocent,” is beyond me), there would have been no D-Day — and no V-Day almost a year later either, for that matter.
In 2024, Hitler’s successors would be still giving speeches in Reichstag, the grand-kids of Hitler’s soldiers would still be goose-stepping in parades all over Europe, their shouts of “Heil!” echoing in its every corner — and, of course, there would be no gathering of the heads of democratic countries in Normandy in a few weeks because there would be no democratic countries, (nor would there be free Normandy to come to, for that matter!).
Some difference!
We hear that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Not so. There is a colossal difference between 1944 and 2024, between FDR and Biden, between Eisenhower and today’s US generals, between the press forming public opinion then, and the press now, between the greatly anticipated D-Day and the much-maligned Rafah operation, The change is for the worst: the West has become ignorant, and can no longer tell the right from the wrong, losing its moral footing in the process. The anti-Western forces of ignorance and medieval darkness — called Islamism by some, Islamofascism by others– are on the rise, ascending over the confused and frightened West.
Still, not all is lost. Amidst the 2024 confusion, there are still islands of 1944 sanity in the world. While the New York Times informs us that “if it were up to the Biden administration, Israel would not go into Rafah at all … [and the Secretary of Defense] Austin and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as other senior American military officials, have pointed to past American efforts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan as examples of what they think Israeli forces should and should not do” (as if Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan were US’s successes rather than failures!), and the leaders of Germany and France who will surely be present at the D-Day ceremony on June 6 warn Israel against going into Rafah (would they have opposed the D-Day that freed their countries from Nazism?), the majority of Israelis understand that the country’s back is against the wall, that the total victory over Hamas is a must. They also understand that it can only be achieved by taking Rafah; they know that the Rafah operation is the 2024 equivalent of the 1944 D-Day.
The latest news seem to suggest that it may have already started, despite the Biden-led naysayers. May Israel’s D-Day in Rafah be successful, inflicting decisive defeat on Hamas with as few Israeli losses as possible. Godspeed!
Bambie Thug of Ireland performs at Eurovision 2024 (YouTube screenshot)
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
Vocally anti-Israel Bambie Thug flew into a tear-filled rant with vulgarities after placing sixth place behind Israel’s Eden Golan.
During the Eurovision semi-finals, Bambie Thug insisted Israel should be disqualified after Kan News described their act as “Satanic,” because it featured their dancing with a man resembling the devil and writhing on the floor next to lit-up pentagrams.
They said they were waiting to hear back from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) about disciplinary action that may be taken against Israel.
Kan journalists wrote of Ireland’s performance that the song ‘Doomsday Blue’ would be ‘the most scary’ of the night, involving ‘a lot of spells and black magic and dark clothing, Satanic symbols, and voodoo dolls.”
Bambie Thug, who identifies as non-binary witch and uses “they” pronouns, also complained about being asked by Eurovision to remove the words “Saoirse Don Phalistin” which is Irish Gaelic for “Free Palestine” and the word “Ceasefire” from her costume.
They claimed that Kan‘incited violence against me twice, three times.’
During an actual incident of harassment of a female production crew member that led to Netherland’s Joost Klein’s disqualification, some contestants blamed Israel for the incident although no one from the Israel delegation was involved.
Regarding the EBU, Bambie Thug said, “They waited to the last minute, still haven’t gotten a statement back to us, allowed us to be scapegoats, allowed us to be the spokesperson for standing up for ourselves.”
Bambie Thug, who missed their dress rehearsal, seemed to be alluding to another accusation of an incident involving Israel occurring behind the scenes, but refused to provide any details about the ‘situation’ that required ‘urgent attention.’
They added, “And yeah, the broadcaster has disobeyed the rules and I hope they won’t be able to compete next year because of that.”
Bambie Thug added, “And I just want to say we are what the Eurovision is. The EBU is not what the Eurovision is. F**k the EBU. I don’t even care anymore.”
Eleven years later, the new iteration of the Obama administration has learned nothing. It intends, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, to install the Palestinian Authority as the government of an independent Palestinian state on both sides of Israel. Credit: AP
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken advised Israel not to carry out its planned ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, suggesting that the IDF instead plan its exit strategy and attempt to ensure the demilitarization of Hamas.
Speaking with CBS News Sunday, Blinken panned the Israeli government’s plan to destroy the remaining four Hamas battalions reportedly active in Rafah, defending President Joe Biden’s warning that the U.S. could dramatically alter its support for the Israeli military if the Rafah operation proceeds.
“We have real concerns about the way [American weapons] are used,” said Blinken.
“What we’ve been clear about is that if Israel launches this major military operation to Rafah, then there’s certain systems that we’re not going to be supporting and supplying for that operation.”
The Secretary of State dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of eradicating the Hamas terror organization as unachievable, suggesting that the group will remain in Gaza even after the war.
PUTIN CALLS FOR ‘RESTRAINT’ AFTER IRAN ATTACKS, BLAMES MIDEAST TURMOIL ON ISRAEL-GAZA WAR
Israel should instead focus its efforts on devising an exit strategy that would see the demilitarization of Hamas, Blinken added.
“As we look at – at Rafah, they may go in and have some initial success, but- but potentially at an incredibly high cost to civilians, but one that is not durable, one that’s not sustainable. And they will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left no matter what they do in Rafah.”
Blinken citing the resurgence of Hamas forces in areas vacated by the IDF following operations earlier in the war, including the southern city of Khan Younis, formerly the headquarters of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.
“We’re seeing parts of Gaza that Israel has cleared of Hamas, where Hamas is coming back, including in the north, including in Khan Younis.”
In place of a ground operation in Rafah, Blinken called for Israel to develop “credible plans for security, for governance, for rebuilding,” tacitly accepting Hamas’ continued existence in Gaza.
“We want to make sure it’s demilitarized,” Blinken said.
Disruption & Dissent: The Tense Atmosphere at University Commencements Amid Pro-Hamas Protests
Edited by: TJVNews.com
The recent university commencement ceremonies across the United States have emerged as platforms for promulgating the most egregious manifestations of virulent anti-Semitism, reflecting a larger narrative of social and political upheaval. In a year marked by widespread pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, these events—symbolic milestones for students—have been infused with tension and controversy. This phenomenon was vividly illustrated at several notable institutions.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a renowned hub of student activism, the commencement ceremony was notably disrupted by a large group of graduates who chose to voice their dissent loudly, as was reported on Sunday in the New York Times. The ceremony, typically a celebratory event, turned into a scene of protest with chants and signs, disrupting the proceedings and drawing attention to the students’ animus towards Israel.
The commencement at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond showcased a different facet of student activism, focusing on domestic political issues and institutional policies. Approximately 60 students, led by Micah White, aged 26, staged a walkout during Governor Glenn Youngkin’s speech, as per the NYT report. White expressed disillusionment with VCU’s purported commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, juxtaposed with the decision to invite a commencement speaker whose political stances and actions they found contradictory to these values.
U.S.: UC Berkeley graduation ceremony addresses student protests#us#protest#ucberkeley
A group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators began waving flags and chanting during commencement at the University of California, Berkeley.
Governor Youngkin had recently been involved in controversies relevant to the student body, notably requesting to review course materials for proposed racial literacy classes and supporting actions leading to the dismantling of a peaceful encampment on campus. As was noted in the NYT report, this latter incident resulted in arrests and confrontations between protesters and police, further inflaming tensions within the student community. Sereen Haddad, a 19-year-old psychology student at VCU, reported being knocked to the ground during these clashes, highlighting the physical and emotional toll of these confrontations on students.
Students walked out of their commencement at Virginia Commonwealth University Saturday to protest Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
The students, some wearing masks, were upset Youngkin doesn’t support children getting gender surgery.
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) May 12, 2024
At the University of Wisconsin, the atmosphere was charged as a small group of graduates turned their backs on their chancellor during her address. The NYT report said that this act of protest, though quieter, was no less significant, symbolizing disapproval and dissatisfaction with the administration or its policies.
Anticipating disruptions, many university administrators had taken stringent measures to maintain order and decorum. This included increased security details, the establishment of designated free speech zones, and in some cases, the dismantling of protest encampments, the report in the NYT noted. These actions called attention to the delicate balance universities sought to achieve between upholding free expression and ensuring the ceremonies proceeded without significant hindrance.
The University of Wisconsin’s administration notably reached an agreement with protestors, agreeing to a meeting to discuss the university’s investments in return for clearing their encampment. This negotiation highlighted attempts at dialogue and compromise in the face of potential conflict.
For many students, the graduation ceremony held particular significance. Having missed their high school graduations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the university commencement represented a long-awaited opportunity for formal recognition and celebration, the NYT report indicated. The backdrop of protests added a layer of complexity and emotional weight to these events.
According to the NYT report, for students such as David Emuze, his graduation ceremony at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was a long-anticipated event, laden with personal and collective significance. Wearing his electric-blue mortarboard and orange sash, Emuze, a bachelor’s degree graduate in public health, experienced a ceremony that stood in stark contrast to his virtual high school graduation. The presence of his mother in the audience added to the emotive weight of the occasion.
The keynote speaker, Jeanne Gang, an esteemed architect and alumna of the University, delivered a speech that resonated deeply with the graduates. She addressed the current global challenges but emphasized the importance of unity and celebration at such a pivotal moment in the graduates’ lives, the NYT report noted. Her words, acknowledging the tumultuous global backdrop, aimed to galvanize the students into celebrating their accomplishments amidst adversity.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a notable demonstration unfolded during the commencement ceremonies. Ignoring warnings from school officials, a group of students commandeered a section of empty stadium seats behind the main stage. Their chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “UC divest” resonated through the area, drawing an increasing number of participants. The NYT reported that the group, which eventually grew to about 500, made a significant impact with their vocal opposition to what they perceive as injustices associated with the university’s financial investments and its stance on global political issues. As the graduation neared its end, most of these protesters peacefully dispersed.
Greta Brown, a graduate in environmental science, adorned her cap and gown with a stole marked “Palestine,” standing out as a vocal participant in the protests, as per the information provided in the NYT report. Her actions, along with those of her fellow protesters, were driven by a belief that the university’s response to ongoing global issues, particularly the war in Gaza, was insufficiently proactive or too neutral.
The commencement began with a contentious tone as Chancellor Carol Christ faced boos upon taking the podium. However, her mention of the pro-Palestinian encampment near Sproul Hall shifted the crowd’s response to cheers, the NYT report noted. Acknowledging the students’ passion and her own concerns about the violence in Gaza, Dr. Christ’s words reflected a sensitive balance between administration and student advocacy.
The protests escalated during the ceremony. A significant number of students displayed signs advocating for divestment from companies doing business with Israel and waved Palestinian flags, culminating in a chant that disrupted the speech by student body president Sydney Roberts. The NYT reported that Roberts’ remark, “This wouldn’t be Berkeley without a protest,” captured the essence of the event.
In the days preceding several high-profile university commencements, the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Arizona became focal points for pro-Palestinian protests. According to the NYT report, these demonstrations, characterized by the establishment of encampments, drew significant attention and prompted a firm response from university authorities. At MIT and Penn, encampments were systematically dismantled by officers, a move that mirrored actions taken at other institutions facing similar protests.
The situation escalated notably at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where authorities deployed “chemical munitions” to disperse protesters from an encampment just hours before the commencement ceremony, the NYT report added. This forceful response not only cleared the area but also set a tense backdrop for the graduation proceedings that evening.
The University of North Carolina’s commencement ceremony on Saturday night became a theater of conflicting sentiments and reactions, illuminating the deep divides within the student body and the broader community. The interim chancellor, Lee Roberts, faced vocal opposition from many students as a consequence of his decision to remove an encampment of pro-Hamas protesters the previous month, as per the NYT report.
Anti-Israel demonstrators gather at UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor’s office, smear red paint on building
Anti-Israel demonstrators gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus on Saturday ahead of the commencement ceremony.
The climax of the ceremony occurred when two students, carrying Palestinian flags, interrupted Chancellor Roberts’s speech by walking onto the field. Indicated in the NYT report was that their demonstration, however, was not met with widespread support. Instead, a significant portion of the audience reacted negatively, booing the protesters and chanting “USA! USA!”
Just as Hamas targeted young children, even babies, for unthinkable torture and death, pro-Hamas demonstrators in Berkeley targeted a Jewish Community Center (NOT an Israeli facility) with preschool students in class as they chanted slogans through a bullhorn and marched. Even worse, the students who walked out were reportedly accompanied by two vice principals from the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School as they intimidated the innocent toddlers, guilty solely of being Jewish.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, Berkeley Photo credit: Maplebed CC BY-SA 3.0 license
The Scanner got multiple reports about a walkout march from King middle school that stopped to protest outside the Berkeley branch of the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay.
The protest group was made up of an estimated 60 or more middle school students who were chanting with a bullhorn and accompanied by school administrators, parents said.
When the group stopped for several minutes to protest outside the JCC, which is about a half-mile from the King campus, JCC security went outside to investigate and Berkeley police were also called. (snip)
One BUSD parent said the protest reports were concerning in part because the district had promised parents on Thursday, by email, that no school staff would accompany the student march.
In the email, school leadership said students might have a walkout Friday, and that they might march to UC Berkeley during the event.
“Site and district staff will monitor students at the school site, but we will not have the capacity to walk with students to UC Berkeley or monitor their activity while on the university campus where there will be other activities happening,” King Principal Michael Tison Yee told parents in the email Thursday. (snip)
“Although this was not a district sanctioned event, our administration team made a decision to accompany the students to monitor for safety,” BUSD spokeswoman Trish Mcdermott told The Scanner by email in response to an inquiry about Friday’s events.
Sorry, Ms. Mcdermott: sending two vice principals to accompany the tyros as they terrorized tots does symbolically sanction the activity. The “monitor for safety” excuse holds no water because walking out of school and marching up busy city streets in an un-permitted march of children is inherently unsafe. Stopping the march would be the safe option, perhaps warning students that they will be regarded as truant if they skip out of the taxpayer-funded education they are being provided.
Somehow, I doubt that outside adults were not involved in organizing and directing the teen and pre-teen students. Where is the inquiry into their likely role in encouraging truancy?
Casting an even deeper shadow of Jew hatred on the event, it was preceded by antisemitic graffiti at the school:
The Berkeley Unified School District said it is investigating the graffiti report, in which someone scrawled, “[Name redacted] hates Jews. We stand with [name redacted]” next to a Jewish star on a classroom whiteboard.
A photograph of that message that has been shared among parents and other community members was also provided to The Berkeley Scanner along with concerns about the message.
The superintendent of Berkeley’s public schools, however, doesn’t think Jew hatred at her schools is a big deal:
Friday’s reports come at a difficult time for the Berkeley Unified School District, whose superintendent, Enikia Ford Morthel, told federal lawmakers this week that “antisemitism is not pervasive” in the district.
Question: would nine complaints of anti-black racism be similarly regarded with equanimity?
Incidentally, Superintendant Ford Morthel describes herself as “an urban educator and community activist, dedicated to creating public education experiences that are revolutionary, relevant and responsive for students and families.”
Update: Serious harassment of Jews in Berkeley Schools has been taking place. Via UnitedwithIsrael:
…a second-grade teacher, who hung a Palestinian flag in the window of her classroom after Oct. 7, threatened the family of a concerned father after learning he had reported her conduct.
“I know who you are, I know who you f— wife is, and I know where you live,” the teacher said to him at a school event. Later, in a Facebook post, the teacher defended her politicization of the classroom, proclaiming, “I’ve been a non-neutral educator for all 20 years I’ve been a teacher.”
“The eruption of of antisemitism in Berkeley’s elementary and high schools is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Brandeis Center chairman and former Assistant Secretary of Education Kenneth Marcus said in a press release announcing the legal action.
“It is dangerous enough to see faculty fanning the flames of antisemitism on college campuses, but to see teachers inciting hate in the youngest grades while Berkeley administrators sit idly by as it continues to escalate by the day is reprehensible. Where is the accountability? Where are the people who are supposed to protect and educate students?”
At several schools throughout BUSD, students were recruited to assist anti-Zionists teachers in cheering Hamas’ atrocities as “liberation.”
They were called on to join “walk outs” and rewarded with excused absences in return for their participation, another violation of district policy forbidding excused absences for all but the most important reasons.
These demonstrations became salvos of antisemitic rhetoric. During one organized at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, students shouted “KKK,” “Kill Israel,” “Kill the Jews,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
In another incident, the second-grade teacher who threatened a parent instructed her students to write “Stop bombing babies” on sticky notes.
The behavior of BUSD teachers and the benefits they offered in exchange for engaging in antisemitic behavior sent a strong signal to students that hating Jews is normal, socially acceptable behavior, the complaint explains.
Acting on such approval, they proceeded to bully Jewish students with impunity. “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” a Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School student told their Jewish classmate.
Another called a Jewish student a “midget Jew,” and throughout the district it became a trend to ask Jewish students if they have a “number,” an allusion to tattoos given to Jewish concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust.
In almost every case investigations of teacher misconduct and bullying never led to disciplinary measures.
Others are far from sanguine over the safety and emotional wellbeing of Jewish children entrusted to Ford Morthel’s tender mercies:
EdSource reported that the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education plans to investigate allegations that BUSD “failed to respond properly to rising incidents of antisemitism in its schools.”
That includes a complaint by two Jewish civil rights organizations “urging an investigation into the ‘virulent wave of antisemitism’ aimed at Israeli and Jewish students” in Berkeley Unified, EdSource reported.
The group pitches to school districts in California an alternative to the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum framework with a focus on dismantling capitalism, systems of racism, and Zionism, which it equates to colonialism. The group’s leaders include ethnic studies professors from California State University and the University of California. (snip)
Ford Morthel testified Wednesday that the district has not purchased a Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum. Rather, she said, the district takes pride that teachers and community partners have written the curriculum. Teachers created lessons on Israel and Palestine because of “a lot of curiosity, a lot of questions, and quite frankly, a lot of confusion from many of our students wanting to know what was going on.” (snip)
Early in the two-hour hearing, the chair of the subcommittee, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., forced Ford Morthel and the other two superintendents on the panel, New York City schools Chancellor David Banks and Montgomery County school board President Karla Silvestre, to give one-word answers to a series of complicated questions. One was whether the phrase “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is antisemitic.
Yes or no, Bean asked?
“If it is calling for the elimination of the Jewish people in Israel,” Ford Morthel responded. “And I will also say that I recognize that it does have different meanings to different members of our community.”
“I’m going to go ‘yes.’ I’ll put you down, yes,” Bean said.
Kiley used that answer against her during his questioning. He referred to a slide in the teacher-prepared curriculum that cited the “From the river to the sea” phrase as a call for freedom and peace and paired it with a “supportive quote” by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan, soon after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in Israel. Congress censured Tlaib on a 224-188 Republican-led vote, with members claiming it implied support for armed resistance to abolish the state of Israel.
Many people, including most Jews, also view it that way. Others, Tlaib included, say it evokes future coexistence where everyone can live in freedom in Palestine.
“Do you think that’s an appropriate thing to have on a slide for students?” Kiley asked Ford Morthel.
“So,” she replied, “we definitely believe that it’s important to expose our students to a diversity of ideas and perspectives. And if it was presented as a perspective, I do think it’s appropriate.”
Watch as Ford Morthel responds to questions from California Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley on the curriculum in which she takes pride:
More than fifty years ago, Israel Eldad, the brilliant Zionist philosopher and intellectual voice of the Jewish underground group Lehi during the British Mandate, offered a short parable in his book “The Jewish Revolution.”
In his endeavor to get the reader to understand how the truth has no meaning in the Arab world, Eldad cleverly explains how the Arabs believe their own lies, something best illustrated by the following Middle East parable:
An Arab father, trying to catch an afternoon nap in a home full of boisterous children, barks out the lie that they are giving away free olives at the local market. The loud children all run out to the market to get these “free olives.”
Moments later, in a now empty house, he too suddenly jumps up and runs to the shuk. To get some of those fictitious olives.
The line between fact and fantasy disappears. As it has, with greater occurrence, throughout the whole western world. That the Arabs believe their own myths and lies is nothing new. It seems endemic to country and culture. That the western world has joined that run for olives is troubling indeed.
Israel, of course – we have long trusted – would never make that mistake. And we would be wrong. Israel seems to be already beginning to surrender its claim to the truth, and whether for the sake of political expedience or the inordinate pressures placed upon it by its so-called friends, if that is true, it is making an intractable mistake.
The truth matters. While it ought to be, it is not always self-evident. And words matter. And they too are manipulated to serve to control the language by which all things are measured.
We have argued the obvious before: Language determines the narrative. The narrative determines the discourse or the debate. And the debate ultimately dictates the outcome of the “war of ideas.” It is the newest battleground, no less dangerous than any other.
Historically, Israel has won its wars quite decisively – on the battlefield – but has found itself more recently losing the war of words. The war of ideas. That is an undeniable fact – owing to Israel having been forced into fighting political rather than military wars. Lebanon 2006 was a prime example. Even the diplomatic wars – the many failed faux-peace negotiations have served to marginalize and malign Israel in the international arena.
The present war in Gaza is the most recent manifestation, with much deadlier consequences. This cannot be ignored.
Today, more than seven months into a war with an Arab enemy that believes every fraudulent lie that it has manufactured about Israel and the Jews, Israel is making a fundamental mistake. It is not its first and certainly will not be its last. But it might indeed be the most costly. An irrevocable political miscalculation that will come to haunt Israel as it endeavors to navigate the treacherous international political waters that have become the norm.
To be sure, any casual observer of Middle East affairs has already taken note of Israel seemingly having surrendered its argument that it needed to destroy Hamas if October 7 would not happen again. That call for the destruction, or eradication, of a genocidal Arab Nazi movement that committed atrocities that many deemed too horrific to see, was too short-lived. Even language, it seems, has a shelf-life, and the call to destroy Hamas was readily replaced by the modified call to defeat the savages. Time will tell.
And, in many political arenas, particularly with many of Israel’s so-called friends, even that softened expression was toned down to suggest that Hamas, if not fully defeated, must at least be prevented from governing Gaza henceforth. Notice how the goalposts have been moved. If any Israeli politician, general, or spokesman has suggested lately that Israel destroy Hamas, it is because it was the common refrain only a few months ago, still uttered by a slip of the tongue. “Defeat” is the present nomenclature.
The language was not the only thing that has been bastardized. So has both strategy, and tactics. Where Israel at first refused to speak of a cease-fire – because even a respite of a day or two, we were once told, would be counterproductive to Israel’s war effort – Israel has already modified its position.
Where the establishment of any humanitarian zone would be counterproductive – because the terrorists would find shelter and refuge there – Israel has now played along, even arguing that it was a good idea.
And finally, where the Palestinian Arab civilians of Gaza were at first identified – quite accurately – as either participants or supporters of the war against the Jewish State – Israel has made its most dangerous mistake, addressed below.
Each of these recalculations is done at the cost of what victory ought to look like. Compounded by the perfidious micromanagement by the Biden foreign policy team, Israeli spokesmen have begun to speak about a war “that Israel cannot afford to lose.” That language – and that attitude – is a surrender to Western pressures.
We all know the end-game of all Western pressures, as mandated by Blinken/Biden. A 2-State solution. A 2-State illusion that will be forced upon Israel as the logical follow-up to former US Undersecretary of State George Ball’s “saving Israel in spite of herself” (Foreign Affairs, April 1977).
So, the biggest mistake of all is the manner by which Israel has now begun to argue that the Palestinian Arab civilians are themselves victims of Hamas’s pernicious policies. A tragic mistake! Done to vilify Hamas on the one hand, while presenting Israel as a nation that embodies humanitarian concerns on the other, it is a mistake – a trap – that must not be lost on anyone who advocates for a strong and secure Israel.
We all know the truth. All polls, conducted by the Palestinian Arab research centers themselves, are quite clear, and seemingly quite proud. Post-October 7, a significant percentage of Palestinian Arab “civilians” boast their support for Hamas (87%, 81% and 71% in three such polls), while an unfathomable 98% said they were made to feel “more proud to be Palestinian Arabs” by the atrocities and the massacre. Meanwhile, with a strategic plan in the works in the White House, all relevant facts are purposefully ignored.
Hence, the impending disaster that is inevitable if Israel continues to engage in nonsensical talk of Palestinian Arab victims. You know what follows – a predictable expectation of a Palestinian state, championed by the United States.
After all – if Hamas is viewed as Israel’s enemy, and the Palestinian Arab residents of Gaza are not, then Hamas, once defeated, will leave “innocent” Palestinian Arabs bereft of governance. And – if they are indeed victims now freed of the Hamas despotic military arm and its coercion – then why would anyone (read: Israel) not agree to a Palestinian State? And why not – if the Palestinian Arab civilians are “innocent”? Absent Hamas, with a “moderate” Palestinian Authority waiting in the wings, they are sure to be perfect neighbors… Biden and Blinken have assured us as much.
Israel needs to retain the common sense seemingly lost – resist the pressures that have already compelled Israeli spokesmen to speak almost daily about “Palestinian Arab civilian”suffering – and axiomatically surrender the war of words and ideas. Instead, Israel must be prepared for the end-game that its fraudulent friends have in store for it.
Israel must fight a military war that leads to some form of victory. No more politics. They only usher disaster.
a. We cannot and should not ever countenance the 2-State delusion.
b. There are no innocent Gazans, just as there were no free olives in the market.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
It is incumbent upon the Biden Administration to support Israel’s actions in Rafah, recognizing that such support is not merely an endorsement of military action but a commitment to facilitating a strategic blockade against a terrorist organization that continues to jeopardize the stability of the region and the safety of countless civilians. Photo Credit: AP
By Joel B. Pollak (Breitbart)
The Biden administration has reportedly offered Israel intelligence on the whereabouts of Hamas leaders in tunnels underneath Gaza — if Israel ends its ongoing attack on the last Hamas stronghold in the Gaza town of Rafah.
The Washington Post reported on Saturday: “The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.”
The offer puzzled observers, who wondered why the Biden administration did not simply give Israel the intelligence needed to find the Hamas leaders, especially as five Americans are still hostage.
The Biden administration has insisted since February that Israel should not attack Hamas in Rafah, suggesting that there are other ways to remove the Hamas leaders from Gaza. The administration has never said what those ways are.
Biden recently paused certain arms shipments to Israel, including heavy bombs and artillery, as a statement of opposition to Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israel sees the operation as necessary to win the war and prevent Hamas from returning to power in Gaza.
Supporters of Israel in the United States have also argued that if Hamas survives, terror groups will be emboldened around the world, and will step up attacks on the U.S. and other countries.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Howard Horowitz, Head of Westchester’s People’s Action Coalition Foundation (Wespac), a nonprofit 501(c)(3), has emerged as one of the leading funders of the pro-Hamas demonstrations across the United States. Founded in 1974, Wespac’s supposed guiding principle is “nonviolent protests against injustice, discrimination, war and the causes of climate change.” While keeping its sources of revenue’s secret its lack of transparency has raised a number of red flags. Knowing these protests have been anything but peaceful as calls to annihilate Jews, to repeat October 7th thousands of times, coupled with violent punching, stomping, and pushing of Jewish students as they are forced to flee college campuses for their lives, has made Horowitz’s orthodox upbringing all the more troubling. Wespac is the financial linchpin for dozens of Jew hating organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL) a group led by Muslim Nerdeen Kiswani that has physically harassed students outside the Columbia gates. Kiswani likes to say things such as, “I hope that pop-pop is the last noise Zionists hear in their lifetime.” Wespac does not make its fiscal sponsorships public and its sole employee other than Horowitz is Nada Khader, a Palestinian who has joined Horowitz in placing the blame for October 7th on Israel.
Professor Alisse Waterston
Supporting over 15 anti-Israel groups, Wespac’s laser-like focus remains on the obliteration of Israel. A major proponent of BDS the group’s ties to antisemite Rep. Jamaal Bowman and AOC are no surprise. Wespac’s website and tax documents give no indication of its pro-Palestinian activism making it difficult to track the money that ends up in pro-Palestinian hands. The last revenue statement in 2021 revealed they had assets amounting to over $1 million-however, that amount has increased exponentially since October 7th. Wespac’s sole office is in White Plains as its traces its roots to the 1970’s as a proponent of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. Immediately following October 7th Horowitz stated his outrage at Israel “for its ongoing implementation of genocide involving forced death marches and indiscriminate bombing of 27,000 Gazans” remarking the future of the Jewish people depends on “justice for Palestine.” Wespac has been named as one of the key funders of tent-city encampments at universities and for training protestors on how to wreak havoc after receiving hundred of thousands from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
Horowitz’s murky origins have him claiming to have been brought up in Monticello, New York where he attended a Jewish elementary school and public high school. With an orthodox mother and father, the eighty-something year old’s undergraduate work began at NYU where he got both his degree in Psychology and his graduate degree in Political Science with a sociology degree from Bucknell University. He worked on Bill Clinton’s Arkansas governor campaign in the late 70’s and founded Horowitz Associates in 1985 as well as Horowitz Research which currently has 18 employees and which specializes in the marketing of television, computer and internet services for consumers-whatever that means. He is a member of the Israel Action Committee of Temple Israel of New Rochelle, a founding member of Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration and an active member of Westchester’s Jewish Voice for Peace. After several stints living in Jerusalem and on a kibbutz in the early 70’s Horowitz moved to Westchester where he became anti-Zionist having felt the partition plan robbed the Palestinians of their homes, livelihood and lands. He then met Alisse Waterston, Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College CUNY, who is also the President of the American Anthropological Association and they have three children together, Dan, Matthew and Leah, and a number of grandchildren. Howard has for years called on Jewish institutions to abandon Israel and has remained a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals as groups conducting flood-themed protests including bridge and highway blockades have been funded by Horowitz. As Congress seeks to crack down on domestic terrorist organizations its first steps must be accessing the opaque accounts of covert organizations such as Wespac.
Young Jewish men holding Israeli flags dance at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City, during Jerusalem Day celebrations, May 29, 2022. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90 *** Local Caption
(A7) Leading Religious Zionist rabbis have published a joint call on the public to rejoice on Yom Haatzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, and to thank G-d for the miracles to send a clear message to Israel’s enemies who aim to prevent the Jewish people from rejoicing.
The letter opens with a mention of the bereaved families and the hostages: “All of our hearts are with the many families who are hurting for the loss of their-our loved ones and the families who are terrified for the fate of their-our loved ones who are imprisoned by the talons of evil. Not one of us doubts that joy is difficult for them and us.”
On the other hand “preventing joy and stopping it can help our enemies reach their goal – weakening our existence and dwarfing the miracles of miracles that were done for us for over 70 years,” the rabbis explained.
The rabbis, including Rabbi Dov Lior and Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, added that “Judaism forever knew how to combine sorrow with joy when needed, for instance (the custom of) placing ashes on the head of the groom and remembering Jerusalem during our joyous events. The State of Israel as well, for decades, has known how to go from the mourning of Memorial Day to the joy of Yom Haatzmaut.”
Later in the letter, the rabbis call on the public: “Therefore we must continue the great joy which gives strength to our soldiers and all of our people – to continue in great dedication to defend our nation.
“Yeshivas and synagogues should continue reciting prayers of thanks, singing, and dancing, for our brothers who sacrificed themselves for our nation and land. Of course, it is appropriate to avoid frivolity and debauchery, as every year and to celebrate with a feeling of ‘rejoice with trembling.’ We will all continue with every effort to ensure unity and our dear tradition, which our enemies are attempting to desecrate by harming the holidays of Israel,” the rabbis concluded.
(A7) On the eve of Israel’s 76th Independence Day, the population of Israel was 9.900 million, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported.
Comprising Israel’s population are 7.427 million Jews (73.2%), 2.089 million Arabs -Muslims, Arab Christians and Druze (21.1%), and 564,000 others (5.7%). “Others” is defined as non-Arab Christians, other religions, and those registered as not classified by religion.
Since last year’s Independence Day, Israel’s population has grown by 189,000 (an increase of 1.9%). During this period, about 196,000 infants were born, about 37,000 immigrants arrived, and about 60,000 people died. Additional growth components include family reunifications, and balancing for Israelis staying abroad for over a year.
At the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, the population of Israel was 806,000. It has increased by a factor higher than 12 since then.
Since the State’s founding, over 3.4 million immigrants have arrived in Israel, about 1.6 million (47.1%) of them arrived since 1990. Since 1970, about 153,000 immigrating citizens have also settled in the country.
Bernie Sanders gestures at the 2019 J Street conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2019. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Matthew Continetti- Free Beacon
Since May 8, when President Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the United States would not supply Israel with weapons if the IDF enters Hamas’s stronghold in the Gaza Strip, many of Israel’s supporters in the United States have felt a sense of shock, confusion, anger, betrayal, abandonment, and dread.
Shock at the suddenness of the policy reversal and the banal setting of Biden’s major shift. Confusion at the incoherence of a policy that denounces anti-Semitism one day and protects Hamas the next. Anger at the news that Biden tried to hide his “pause” in munitions shipments to Israel so that it would not interfere with coverage of his speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Betrayal at his threat to deny Israel the tools it needs to finish the task of ending Hamas as a coherent military force. And dread at what might befall the United States and Israel during the remainder of this presidency.
What happened to the Joe Biden who exhibited moral clarity toward Israel? Did he shuffle off the stage in search of ice cream?
For a while after the October 7 attacks, it looked as if Biden might back Israel to the hilt. As Biden said in Tel Aviv on October 18, Hamas’s despicable acts “recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world.” In America’s campaign against ISIS, we dropped heavy bombs on urban environments. Not because we wanted to. Because terrorists who burrow underground and use civilians as shields force us to.
Then the war in Gaza ground on. Media outlets amplified Hamas propaganda. Biden’s poll numbers dropped. He lost the plot. He began to waver. And he retreated to his usual corner: the Bernie Sanders left.
Sanders’s priorities have informed Biden’s governance as far back as the unity task force in the summer of 2020. Biden filled his government with allies of Sanders’s left-wing ally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.). True, Biden repudiated Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defund the Police, and Abolish ICE. But his “Build Back Better” agenda would transform the United States into a social democracy. His Inflation Reduction Act and electric vehicle subsidies and environmental regulations are catnip for the green movement. He’s done little to stop the millions who have crossed the southern border illegally. His regulatory agencies are anti-business. His student-loan forgiveness initiatives are an unconstitutional sop to the campus left. Biden hasn’t endorsed the Sanders-Warren program. He just dances to its tune.
Consider: On April 22, the same day Biden denounced “anti-Semitic protests” as well as “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” the president met with Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Ocasio-Cortez supports illegal pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses. She has repeated the disgusting slander that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. And she belongs to the notorious “Squad” of anti-Semitic Democratic members of Congress like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman.
Biden was all smiles with the extremist AOC. “I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady,” Biden said before the private meeting. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too.”
On May 3, around the time Biden denounced the campus protests in brief remarks, Sanders told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that, like LBJ and the Vietnam war, “President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war.” Sanders went on to say he hoped Biden “stops giving a blank check to [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and I would hope that they understand that from a political point of view, this has not been helpful.”
Message received. Among the few lawmakers who unequivocally backed Biden’s “red line” against Israel: Bernie Sanders.
If Biden sees short-term gain in his alliance with Sanders, he is mistaken. Daylight between the United States and Israel emboldens Iran and its murderous proxies. This isn’t guesswork. It’s the story of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Obama downgraded relationships with traditional U.S. allies such as Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to withdraw America from the region under the cover of the Iranian nuclear deal. Wars in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, a supercharged global Islamist movement, and an Iran engorged on oil money and sanctions relief were the result.
No one should want to repeat this bloody history. But that is the path Biden has chosen. “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” he told Erin Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”
Does he even know what “security” means? Israel is not waging war in places like Rafah for fun. Israel is fighting Hamas because Israel was attacked on October 7 and because the terrorist organization poses an existential threat. If Hamas remains in power anywhere in Gaza, it will regenerate, replenish, and plan future atrocities. Israel won’t be secure.
Worse, if Hamas survives the current hostilities, it will be seen as the victor throughout the Greater Middle East and in the Arab and Muslim world more generally—not to mention in places such as Russia and China, or inside faculty lounges and tent encampments throughout the West. The risks to Israel will multiply. The tactics used in anti-Semitic marches and protests will be legitimized. Harassment and violence against Jews will grow.
If Israel cannot achieve its aims of defeating Hamas and recovering the hostages, then Israel will suffer a tremendous blow to its credibility as a state. Israelis will lose confidence in their government’s capacity to protect them from Iran’s ring of fire. Some Israelis may look for the exits. Other Jews may think twice before migrating to the Holy Land. The foundation of Zionism—that the Jewish people will find security in their national home—will be undermined.
That is why Israel has no choice but to continue its war. That is why “walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas” is the same as walking away from Israel’s security. Weakening the U.S.-Israel alliance, pressuring Netanyahu to tamp down or pause military operations, forcing on Israel a ceasefire weighted toward Hamas, and otherwise constraining the actions of our democratic ally of 76 years serves no constructive purpose whatsoever. All it does is degrade and destroy.
Biden may think that, by listening to Sanders and to Ocasio-Cortez, he is walking away from Israel’s war. He is not. He is embracing a morally blind and strategically unsound position. And more voters will walk away from him.
A Pakistani Rhodes Scholar at Harvard College is one of the key organizers of the school’s anti-Israel encampment.
Asmer Asrar Safi, a Harvard senior and international student from Pakistan, has distinguished himself as a primary organizer of the ongoing encampment, which has successfully maintained its presence for over two weeks. Months earlier, in November, Harvard congratulated Safi on being named a Rhodes Scholar, highlighting his intention to study “progressive political messaging” at the University of Oxford. Harvard students interested in applying for the Rhodes Scholarship must first receive the Ivy League school’s endorsement, a selective process in which half of Harvard’s prospective applicants are rejected.
Safi is an organizer with the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine coalition, an anti-Israel group leading the encampment. In an interview with the Boston Party for Socialism and Liberation, conducted on the first day of the encampment, Safi outlined the group’s demands—mainly that the Ivy League school divest from Israel and pledge not to punish anti-Israel protesters who have violated university policies. He went on to say that students at the encampment are there to stay until Harvard meets their demands.
“We have three demands,” said Safi. “The first is that Harvard disclose all of its investments in occupied Palestine. The second demand is that it divest from all said investments and reinvest them in the propagation of Palestinian art, academia, literature, and culture. And the third demand is that it drops all disciplinary and legal charges against individuals for their student activism and advocacy.”
“Our idea is to show the world that despite that repression, pro-Palestine students will keep coming out and keep speaking out for the people of Gaza,” Safi went on. “We’re here to stay and stand ground and demand divestment until Palestine is free.”
A week later, the now-suspended undergraduate Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee—for which Safi is also an organizer—posted a video of Safi leading chants against the school administrators, including interim president Alan Garber. Safi’s Palestine Solidarity Committee is also the student group behind the infamous Oct. 8 statement that blamed Israel for provoking Hamas’s terror attack. The statement said the Jewish state is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and the “apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
Garber on Monday told protesters encamped on campus that they must disband or would be placed on “involuntary leave,” after nearly two weeks of chaos on campus. Four days later, according to the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard began issuing suspension notices to student protesters, “effective immediately.” It is unclear whether Safi is among those suspended and, if so, how that affects his visa status, upcoming graduation, and Rhodes Scholarship.
Safi’s role in the anti-Israel occupation comes as the Rhodes Scholarship program is facing scrutiny over its apparent political bent. A recent analysis from the American Enterprise Institute found that just 1 of the 157 Rhodes scholars over the past five years expressed interest in a conservative issue. Centrist issues are similarly outnumbered. The AEI analysis found that immigrants’ rights received more interest from Rhodes Scholars than cybersecurity, mental health, and national security combined.
At Harvard, prospective Rhodes applicants must receive approval from a two-tiered endorsement committee before they are allowed to apply. After securing Harvard’s endorsement, Safi flew 7,000 miles to Pakistan for his interview and was subsequently selected as one of his nation’s two Rhodes Scholars. His Rhodes profile notes that at Harvard he majored in “Social Studies and Ethnicity, Migration and Human Rights, with a focus on the intellectual history of the interactions between Islamic and Marxist political thought in South Asia.”
Neither Safi nor Harvard responded to requests for comment.
Safi was listed last month as one of the two student organizers behind a petition that triggered a referendum asking students whether Harvard should divest from entities linked to “Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Safi said he helped draft the petition in response to similar resolutions from the Harvard Law School Student Government and Harvard Divinity School Student Association. Those resolutions call on the Ivy League school to divest from “illegal Israeli settlements,” and Safi said he hopes to “capitalize off of [the resolutions’] momentum.”
“One thing that we want to definitely emphasize is that Harvard has a responsibility to listen to us,” Safi said.
Safi’s anti-Israel activism at Harvard goes back to 2021, when he authored an op-ed for the Crimson. He accused Israel’s “apartheid regime” of imposing “a hegemonic, authoritarian rule over Palestinians.” That year, he also signed a divestment statement that called on the university to remove its “nearly $200 million in public, direct and indirect investments in companies that are involved in the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise.”
In 2022, meanwhile, Safi appeared in a series of now-archived Palestine Solidarity Committee videos in which he told listeners that it is their “duty” and “role” to “stand up, fight back, and stand in solidarity with Palestinians.”
“Given the precise state-sponsored nature of the violence that ensues against Palestinians every single day—and the fact of the matter is that the Israeli government sponsors a settler colonial project—it is very pertinent for us to understand about how particular this power dynamic exists,” Safi said in one video. “And as a consequence of that, it is very important for us to realize that it is our job as allies to stand up and speak up in solidarity with Palestinians across the world.”
Pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas supporters set up a protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York, as seen on April 22, 2024. Credit: Lev Radin/Shutterstock.
Matthew Xiao- Free Beacon
The Russell Berrie Foundation, which has donated tens of millions of dollars to Columbia University, has suspended its funding for the Ivy League university amid rising anti-Semitism on campus, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The Jewish foundation—run by Angelica Berrie and named after her late husband—halted its donations to Columbia in late April, three months after warning in an email that its continuing financial support would depend on the university administrators “taking appropriate steps to create a tolerant and secure environment for Jewish members of the Columbia community.”
Columbia president Minouche Shafik in her response to the email did not explicitly address the foundation’s threat of pulling the plug on donations, only stressing that it was her “highest priority” to create “a safe and respectful environment” for students.
The foundation did not like what it had seen on Columbia’s campus since its January warning, according to the New York Times, causing it to cancel a scheduled transfer of more than $600,000 and suspend all future donations to Columbia. The foundation has reportedly given the Ivy League university a total of around $86 million over the years.
“It’s a painful decision for us to have come to this point where we have to tell them, ‘There’s a disconnect between your values and ours,’” Angelica Berrie told the Times, adding that the sharp rise in anti-Semitism at Columbia has made her “weigh the passion my husband had for diabetes against the greater values of our foundation about pluralism, bridge-building and the fact that our Jewish values infuse our philanthropy.”
Columbia spokeswoman Samantha Slater said the university is “grateful for [the foundation’s] generosity and support of innumerable and impactful diabetes initiatives throughout the years.”
“We are committed to sustained, concrete action to make Columbia a community where anti-Semitism has no place and Jewish students feel safe, valued and are able to thrive,” the spokeswoman added.
The foundation’s funding suspension came after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft on April 22 said he would no longer donate to Columbia, his alma mater, due to the “virulent hate” on campus against Jewish people.
“I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken,” the NFL team’s billionaire owner said.
