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    Harvard Law Review Digs Itself Into Deeper Hole Amid Fight With Feds. Plus, Who's Behind the New Columbia Encampment Doc?

    From bad to worse: The Harvard Law Review is facing multiple federal probes over reports, published in the Free Beacon, of racial discrimination at the journal. Its conduct in the face of those probes has only added to the furor. The Review, our Aaron Sibarium reports, "retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents … and demanded, as part of the journal's disciplinary process, that he request their destruction." Those actions came as the journal "was under a document retention order" from the feds. As a result, they "verged on witness intimidation and could get the law review in even deeper trouble with the government," attorneys told Sibarium. "What do they call it when a criminal tries to intimidate the witness?" said Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Justice Department's civil rights division. "If you know someone is a witness in a federal investigation, and you try to intimidate them into stopping cooperation with the government, that in itself is its own offense." READ MORE: Harvard Law Review Retaliates Against Alleged Leaker—And Demands He Press Free Beacon To Destroy Documents Band-aid over a bullet hole: Racial discrimination isn't the only problem plaguing Harvard. There's also the issue of pervasive anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on its campus—something the school pledged to combat in part by hiring a Professor in Residence in Modern Jewish Studies at its Divinity School. That professor, Harvard announced on Wednesday, is self-proclaimed "counter-Zionist" Shaul Magid. For Magid, Zionism is "unjust" and can be "set aside" along with "Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past." Magid's appointment did not land well with Rabbi David Wolpe, who spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard's Divinity School. Magid's views are "very fringe" and don't "represent anything like the mainstream view of the American Jewish community," Wolpe told us. "He is not an answer to the problem that Harvard has with their Jewish students or with the exclusion of mainstream views." READ MORE: Harvard Hires ‘Counter-Zionist’ Professor in Effort To Fight ‘Anti-Israeli Bias’ in Classrooms The radicals write their own history: Last spring, The People's Forum encouraged a group of anti-Israel activists gathered at its Manhattan office to re-create the "summer of 2020" in the name of the Palestinian "resistance." Hours later, rioters stormed and occupied a building on Columbia's nearby campus. A new documentary on Apple TV+, The Encampments, tells the one-sided story of those rioters—and it turns out The People's Forum played a big role in its creation. The documentary was produced by BreakThrough Media, a nonprofit that serves the media arm of The People's Forum's primary benefactor, Neville Singham. The People's Forum and another Singham group "gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media," our Chuck Ross reports. "The People's Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University." "The Singham network's involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America's enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S.," writes Ross. "The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as 'the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.'" READ MORE: An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them In other news: Karine Jean-Pierre's Biden administration colleagues aren't done trashing her, with former White House economic adviser Tim Wu going as far as to call the first black lesbian press secretary "kinda dumb." We're old enough to remember when left-wing pundits insisted Republicans were dead wrong for questioning KJP's qualifications. The left-wing #Resistance is mobilizing to take the bold step of boycotting… popular D.C. restaurants like Le Diplomate. How will Trump recover? Columbia University's Mahmoud Khalil didn't just work for the terror-tied United Nations Relief and Works Agency—he received course credit for doing so, recent court filings show. The post Harvard Law Review Digs Itself Into Deeper Hole Amid Fight With Feds. Plus, Who's Behind the New Columbia Encampment Doc? appeared first on .

    An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them

    A radical group that helped organize anti-Israel protests at Columbia University is part of the same anti-American propaganda network behind a new documentary on Apple’s streaming platform that portrays those protests in a positive light and glosses over students' support for Hamas and other terrorist groups. The Encampments, produced by the nonprofit BreakThrough Media, tracks the Columbia University students who orchestrated anti-Israel protests at the school last April. Apple TV+, which offers the film to rent for $9.99, bills it as an "insider" look into a "historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe." But it may actually serve as a propaganda coup for a sophisticated network of nonprofit groups funded by pro-CCP tech mogul Neville Roy Singham. BreakThrough Media, which claims its film debuted as the #3 documentary in Apple’s documentary category, is the media arm of Singham’s propaganda empire. Singham, the husband of CODEPINK founder Jodie Evans, has poured millions of dollars into two nonprofits, The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund. According to tax records, those groups gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media, which operates a popular YouTube channel that features interviews with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group, and episodes with titles like "How the pro-Israel lobby hijacked Judaism." The People's Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University. The Singham network's involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America's enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S. The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as "the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda." According to a New York Times report, Singham "works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide." Several BreakThrough Media executives worked on The Encampments, which has so far received buzzy reviews from The Guardian, the New Yorker, and other outlets. BreakThrough journalist Kei Pritzker is a co-director of the movie. Ben Becker, the editor in chief of BreakThrough, is an executive producer of the film, and the movie’s credits acknowledge contributions from BreakThrough host Eugene Puryear. Both Becker and Puryear are founders of the Party of Socialism and Liberation—a far-left organization whose past members include Elias Rodriguez, the suspect accused of murdering two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. It’s perhaps no surprise then that The Encampments presents a one-sided view of the Columbia protests and the Israel-Hamas conflict. The movie, which clocks in at 100 minutes, makes little mention of the Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered. But it includes extensive footage of Israeli military operations in Gaza, and quotes speakers accusing Israel of waging "genocide." Many of the activists featured or interviewed in The Encampments have defended or praised Hamas, though those inflammatory remarks are not included in the film. Pritzker, the director, was filmed alongside Columbia student Naye Idriss at a rally just after Oct. 7 in which she stated that "our resistance stormed illegal settlements and paraglided across colonial borders." Those remarks are not included in The Encampments, and Idriss is featured in a sympathetic light throughout the movie. Sueda Polat, a Columbia organizer featured throughout the movie, was a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group that last year stated "violence is the only path forward." Grant Miner, another organizer prevalent in the film, was photographed two days after the Hamas attack on Israel holding a sign that read "Resistance against occupation is a human right," the Washington Free Beacon reported. Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda praises the Columbia protesters in the movie, and asserts that "Israel has tormented us forever." Owda, who was nominated for an Emmy Award last year, spoke at an anniversary gala for the PFLP in 2015. Maya Abdallah and Layan Fuleihan have smaller roles in The Encampments, but both of the activists have defended Hamas’s actions. The Encampments filmmakers, in an apparent attempt to provide a veneer of historic relevance to the protests, interviewed Jamal Joseph, a Columbia arts professor who took part in anti-Vietnam War protests at the Ivy League campus in 1968. The filmmakers omit that Joseph is a former member of the Black Panther Party who served nine years in prison for manslaughter and for harboring fugitive cop killer Mutulu Shakur after the notorious Brinks armored truck robbery involving members of the Weather Underground terrorist group. The Columbia organizers also deny concerns from Jewish students about anti-Semitic activity at the school. In one interview, Miner says "it’s completely farcical to imply that in any way that Jewish people are being persecuted or being driven off the encampment." The film omits any mention of Khymani James, a Columbia student who was suspended over his calls for violence against Israel supporters, including the statement that "Zionists don’t deserve to live." CUAD, the group led by "Encampments" heroine Polat, issued a statement in solidarity with James. And those behind the camera of The Encampments have likewise embraced Hamas or made anti-Semitic statements. Becker defended Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 as an act of "national liberation against colonialism." Puryear praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and mocked the "Israeli hipsters" who were slaughtered in the onslaught. "There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters," Puryear said. "But I’m sure they’re doing very fine." Apple and BreakThrough Media did not respond to requests for comment. The post An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them appeared first on .

    Hamas Terrorist Said Group Collaborates With US Campus Protesters: 'We Have Our Own People Everywhere'

    A Hamas operative who held Israeli civilians hostage in Gaza said Hamas works with anti-Israel protesters and the media to spread anti-Semitism in the United States, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday. Former hostages Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv say in the lawsuit that one of their Hamas captors, Abdallah Aljamal, told them that "Hamas in Gaza was coordinating with its allies, including its allies in the media and on college campuses, to foment hatred against Israel and Jews," the Times of Israel reported. Ziv's captors, including Aljamal, "showed him a news report with stories and pictures of the Columbia protests and the Encampment," the court filing says. "With the news report on, his captors told him, 'You see we have our own people everywhere,'" the filing goes on. "They then told him that Hamas has an 'army' operating out of Gaza that focuses specifically on media and sending Hamas propaganda and messaging throughout America and all around the world." Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were rescued in an Israel Defense Forces operation last June that killed Aljamal. The revelation comes after anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas protests have swept U.S. college campuses following the terrorist group's Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. President Donald Trump has cracked down on campus anti-Semitism, revoking billions of dollars in federal funding from universities that have repeatedly failed to protect Jewish students. Columbia University, which Ziv's captors singled out, in particular has sparked widespread backlash for failing to curb pro-Hamas encampments and demonstrations that glorify violence against Jews. Earlier this month, a mob of agitators stormed a campus library, passed out pamphlets that openly endorsed Hamas's attacks, and chanted, "There is only one solution, intifada revolution." The Friday lawsuit targets the People Media Project, a U.S.-based, tax-exempt nonprofit that runs the Palestine Chronicle, a pro-Hamas news outlet for which Aljamal wrote. According to the lawsuit, the Chronicle served as a platform for Aljamal to "disseminate Hamas propaganda," thereby providing material support to a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Aljamal has "repeatedly expressed his hatred for the State of Israel and the United States" and said that "Hamas was going to ensure that the United States, as well as Jews and Israelis, are hated everywhere," according to the lawsuit. The post Hamas Terrorist Said Group Collaborates With US Campus Protesters: 'We Have Our Own People Everywhere' appeared first on .

    Harvard Commencement Speaker Lauds Classmate Who Assaulted Israeli Student—to Whoops and Cheers From the Crowd

    A Harvard Divinity School graduate selected by faculty members to speak at the school's commencement ceremony used her address to praise Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a classmate who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate. "Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for us to arrive," the speaker, Zehra Imam, told the crowd Thursday while draped in a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. "Elom Tettey-Tamaklo … our friends [sic] and classmate who continues to show up not just for Palestine, but for each of us by extending to us the water we need in our most vulnerable moments. Together we must refuse to be ruled by the tyrants of our time because our liberations are intertwined." Tettey-Tamaklo and his fellow Harvard graduate student, Ibrahim Bharmal, were captured on video, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, pushing, shoving, and surrounding a Jewish student during an October 2023 "die-in" protest, using keffiyehs to obscure their faces and block the student’s view. They faced assault charges over the incident, and a Suffolk County judge ultimately ordered them to perform 80 hours of community service and take an in-person anger management class as part of a pretrial diversion program. Soon after, Tettey-Tamaklo was made a class marshal for the divinity school’s graduation ceremony. A committee of Harvard Divinity School students, faculty, and staff selected Imam—a Muslim Associate-Chaplin at MIT who has long pushed anti-Israel sentiment—as a student speaker for the commencement ceremony, according to a school spokesman. He said Imam deviated from her originally planned speech. "Staff had no prior knowledge of the revised and given speech," the spokesman added. "Neither [Harvard Divinity School] nor Harvard condones the action taken by the students to deviate from the submitted and approved speech. The views and opinions expressed by the speakers during this ceremony are solely those of the individuals and do not reflect the official policy or position of HDS or Harvard University." Imam’s anti-Israel sentiment is long known. Last year, she called on MIT to divest from Israel through a poem she read on a Turkish television show. She also joined a sit-in for "Palestinian freedom" at the university roughly a month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Imam also used her commencement speech to praise "the enormous hearts, unwavering courage, and profound wisdom" of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Columbia University students facing deportation proceedings for leading anti-Semitic activism on campus. Her speech comes at a precarious time for Harvard, with the Trump administration striking on multiple fronts over the Ivy League university’s failure to rein in campus anti-Semitism. The administration is aiming to strip Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, eliminate its tax-exempt status, and freeze billions of dollars in federal funding. Harvard’s posture toward Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal has likely provided fodder for the Trump administration. The university refused to cooperate with the Suffolk County District Attorney's probe into the "die-in," according to the DA's office, and Bharmal was recently awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law Review fellowship. The post Harvard Commencement Speaker Lauds Classmate Who Assaulted Israeli Student—to Whoops and Cheers From the Crowd appeared first on .

    Meet the Professor Northwestern Hired As Part of Deal With Student Radicals

    A Northwestern University professor—hired as part of a deal with anti-Israel groups to end last year’s encampment—sits on the boards of two organizations that were founded by and frequently partner with Palestinian terrorists, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Last year, Northwestern president Michael Schill struck a deal with radical student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), to end their encampment, agreeing to recruit two Palestinian professors and provide full rides to five students from Gaza. Northwestern tapped Mkhaimar Abusada last fall as a visiting associate professor of political science to fill the first of those faculty slots, teaching a weekly undergraduate course on the "Palestinian National Movement." Abusada also serves on the boards of two organizations that present themselves as human rights groups—the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)—that, in reality, maintain close ties to terrorists. ICHR has praised Hamas and met with the terror group’s leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, while PCHR has Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) members on its payroll—with one serving as its leader. NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg condemned Northwestern for hiring Abusada. "His employment as a faculty member is a heinous violation of basic academic norms and moral principles," he said. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East executive director Asaf Romirowsky echoed that sentiment. "When you're signing an agreement with SJP and their sympathizers, they're going to find people who are in agreement with their echo chamber of individuals," he said. "The number one issue is that the institutions are doing no background checks," Romirowsky added. "This is not a matter of academic freedom. This is a matter of national security. This is a matter of threats to the universities themselves. And there needs to be clear red lines." Neither Abusada nor Northwestern responded to multiple requests for comment. Hiring Abusada could serve as a thorn in the university’s side as it faces pressure to rein in campus anti-Semitism. Last month, the Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern amid a civil rights investigation into alleged anti-Semitism and racial discrimination on campus. West Bank-based ICHR was established by former Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, whom Romirowsky described as the "grandfather of all terrorists." The group purports to ensure that the "State of Palestine and the Palestine Liberation Organization meet the requirements for safeguarding human rights," but its members have repeatedly hosted and met with Hamas and PFLP members. In December 2018, for example, ICHR touted a meeting between its staff and Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader Israel assassinated last year. The group shared photos in a Facebook post that said Haniyeh "affirmed Hamas’ commitment to the values of human rights and the legal principles governing rights and freedoms," according to the platform’s autotranslation. Haniyeh later celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault and called for more attacks. Other terror leaders in ICHR’s orbit include Khalil Al-Haya, who serves on Hamas’s leadership committee, and Alam Ka’abi, a PFLP Prisoners Committee official who was sentenced to nine life sentences in 2004 by an Israeli court for his role in enlisting terrorists behind a string of lethal attacks. Romirowsky and Steinberg said ICHR effectively exploits the term "human rights" to paper over political propaganda. "It's not a coincidence that they have used the word ‘human rights.’ When you use the word human rights, you get a pass, because the perception is that this gives it an aura of legitimacy. This is all part of the facade to make that happen, and give the illusion that Yasser Arafat was involved and cared about human rights," Romirowsky told the Free Beacon. "The accusations waged against Israel are all centered on so-called human rights violations. The fact that the PLO and Arafat created these silos of so-called independent commissions on human rights, and the fact that they're the ones who are delivering these messages is all by design." Steinberg added that "​​ICHR officials have applauded heinous terror attacks, including the October 7 atrocities, and the recruitment of Palestinian minors—the exact opposite of the moral principles associated with human rights." Abusada also serves as deputy chairman for PCHR’s board of directors. The Gaza-based group wages lawfare against Israel, such as filing lawsuits with the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants of Jewish state leaders it accuses of "genocide." It was founded by Raji Sourani, a PFLP member who served a three-year prison sentence in Israel for his PFLP membership. In 2012, he was denied a U.S. entry visa because of his links to terrorism. According to Sourani, the goal of PCHR is to "inundate the [Israeli] occupation with hundreds and thousands of legal suits that will incriminate and convict it." Two years later, the PFLP honored Sourani with a ceremony in Gaza after he received the "Alternative Nobel Prize," an award given by the Swedish Right Livelihood Foundation to recognize "the actions of brave visionaries working for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world for all." During the event, Sourani told the attendees, "we are proud that once we were members of [the PFLP] and we fought in its ranks," according to NGO Monitor. Rabah Muhana, a member of the PFLP’s Political Bureau who has called for "escalation of resistance in general and armed struggle in particular against the Zionist enemy," also spoke. Abusada’s predecessor as deputy chair, Jaber Wishah, headed PFLP’s military wing in Gaza. Steinberg said PCHR, like ICHR, calls itself a human rights group to win over sympathizers. "Although labeled as an NGO, it would not be able to exist or operate without the approval and cooperation of Hamas," he told the Free Beacon. "Sourani realized that by using the ‘human rights’ label, he and other PFLP members would be able to get funds and be welcomed in the UN by gullible government officials, university faculty and journalists who don't bother to check the details." "Using this ruse, PCHR has been a leading voice in promoting demonization of Israel and the Palestinian mythology, while keeping their PFLP terror links in the background," Steinberg added. He also pointed to Abusada’s Arabic-language interviews, telling the Free Beacon, "He has frequently expressed support for what he calls the ‘brave Palestinian resistance’ and often echoes Hamas slogans." For instance, "In January 2023, after the murder of seven Israeli civilians outside a Jerusalem synagogue, Abusada told an Arabic media interviewer ‘the flame of Palestinian resistance shall not end.’" Jason Curtis Anderson, cofounder of the good government group One City Rising, was unsurprised by Abusada’s board positions. "We’ve turned a blind eye to terror-linked nonprofits for far too long, allowing them to infiltrate academia, student groups, and the broader nonprofit sector," he said. "So no, I’m not surprised to hear about a professor sitting on the board of an organization with direct ties to terrorism. For these individuals, winning over young minds is part of a long-term strategy to elect more anti-Israel politicians and secure more votes for BDS resolutions." Before moving to the United States, Abusada taught political science at Al-Azhar University, a Gazan school Hamas used to store weapons. And in 2019, he co-moderated a session during the Masarat Center’s annual conference, which included speakers like senior Hamas official Basem Naim, senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Khalid al-Batsh, and senior PFLP member Khalida Jarrar. He and Jarrar spoke at the same conference in 2014, as did senior Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. The post Meet the Professor Northwestern Hired As Part of Deal With Student Radicals appeared first on .

    Attacks on ‘Political’ Graduation Speakers Are Craven Attacks on Intellectual Freedom

    Last week New York University announced that it was withholding the diploma of a graduating senior named Logan Rozos, and commencing disciplinary proceedings against him. His academic “crime?” As a featured graduation speaker, Rozos described the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and expressed moral outrage that the attacks were supported by U.S. tax dollars and university investments. These sentiments, of course, are not universally shared. They, predictably, provoked and offended those present who do not like it when Israel is criticized in this way. More importantly, their expression violates what is quickly becoming an 11th Commandment of Academic Life in the United States: Thou Shall Not Criticize Israel. And so NYU official spokesperson John Beckman, a true inspiration to his increasingly craven profession, immediately vaulted into action to denounce the student and the speech: NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views. He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him. Apparently, those who “lead” NYU believe that graduation speakers—typically selected because of their academic distinction or other exemplary accomplishments—should not express themselves honestly or say anything controversial, should clear their remarks with university censors in advance, and then say only things that will make everyone happy. To challenge an audience on a campus is thus forbidden. Most importantly, invited speakers must never violate the new 11th Commandment. If this strikes you as anti-intellectual, censorious, and absurdly patronizing, consider the perhaps even more outrageous controversy surrounding Harvard’s 2024 Commencement Address, given by Maria Ressa, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defense of press freedom, and civil liberties, in her native Philippines and in the world at large. While this controversy unfolded at Harvard last year, it was brought to national attention only weeks ago, with the April 29 publication of Harvard’s Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which cited Ressa’s speech as an example of the “bias” that the report is charged with countering. According to the report’s Executive Summary, “Ressa chose not to deliver prepared remarks that were meant to urge pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students to reconcile. Instead, she substituted new remarks praising the student protestors and delivered off-the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” The authors then ask: “Why did a renowned humanitarian ad-lib seemingly antisemitic remarks against her Jewish critics at a highly scripted Harvard graduation ceremony?” Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness. When I read these words, on page 12 of the 311-page report, I was shocked and in disbelief. For I have long admired Ressa, have followed her closely, and consider her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, to be one of the very best books I’ve read in recent years. The report’s question struck a chord. Maria Ressa is an antisemite? How can this be? The first thing I did was search for her commencement speech to see for myself what offensive things she said. I quickly found both a transcript and a video, read the first and watched the second, and remained confused about the “seemingly antisemitic remarks.” The speech seemed fine to me; and as I watched it, I wished my own university were willing and able to invite such a fine person to give a commencement address. Only then did I turn to the more elaborate explanation of the problem, on pages 116-17 of the report. Apparently Ressa had shared her prepared remarks in advance (with whom? does Harvard exercise prior restraint on its speakers?), but then deviated from these remarks in her speech, in two ways that troubled the report’s authors and thus merited commentary. First, while in her prepared remarks she very generally alluded to the many different ways that she has been attacked on social media, in her speech she said this: “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money. While the other side was already attacking me because I had been on stage with Hillary Clinton. Hard to win, right?” These, apparently, were the “off the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” What???? In the offending brief paragraph, Ressa clearly references attacks from both “sides” of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine controversy. She says that those labeling her an antisemite—a scurrilous charge without a shred of evidence, I might add—have “power and money.” She does not say her attackers are Jews. She says they are rich and powerful. Because they are rich and powerful. The coverage of the event by the Texas Jewish Post—hardly an antisemitic publication—is instructive. After noting that billionaire “Bill Ackman [had] led a revolt of large donors,” the reporter offered this background: Right-wing media and lawmakers had sought to paint Ressa as antisemitic prior to commencement, pointing to a Filipino-language editorial published in November in her media outlet, Rappler, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, and to her signing of an open letter calling on Israel to protect journalists in Gaza. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, claimed that the Rappler piece compared Israel to Hitler. That claim was amplified on the social network X by New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has gained attention for her combative questioning of university leaders, including Gay, at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. “Harvard chose an antisemitic commencement speaker,” Stefanik wrote earlier this month, sharing a link to the Free Beacon article. “The university has failed to stand up for Jewish students at every turn, revealing the depths of its moral delinquency.” Was it antisemitic for Ressa to say that “money and power” had denounced her? Hardly. Indeed, the report itself elsewhere comments on the efforts of at least three extremely wealthy donors—Ackman, Len Blavatnik, and Ken Griffin—to use promised donations to influence Harvard in the midst of its crisis, though it does not mention that Ackman himself had called Ressa “antisemitic” in a May 3 X post, three weeks before Ressa’s commencement address. Perhaps this is why the report claims that her “offending” words “appeared to echo” antisemitic tropes, and not that they did in fact echo them? For it is hard to see how alluding to a man who is rich, powerful, and censorious as rich, powerful, and censorious echoes antisemitic tropes. Ressa’s second “offense”: She apparently omitted a brief section of her prepared remarks challenging keffiyah-wearing pro-Palestinian protesters (the report doesn’t say whether her prepared remarks also included a comment challenging pro-Israeli protesters, but it seems likely that it did and this too was omitted), and instead delivered add-libbed praise of “student speakers who had addressed the topic of Palestine.” Here, again, are the offending words, worth quoting at length: I loved the speeches of the students today. They were incredible. Because these times will hopefully teach you the same lesson I learned. You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in. Because that defines who you are. But you’re Harvard. You better get your facts right, because now you are being tested. The chilling effect means that many are choosing to stay silent because there are consequences to speaking out. I’m shocked at the fear and anger, the paranoia splitting open the major fracture lines of society, the inability to listen. What happened to us in the Philippines, it’s here. The campus protests are testing everyone in America. Protests are healthy. They shouldn’t be violent. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced. These words are evidence of “antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias”? The report proceeds to devote an entire paragraph to the fact that Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi was offended by Ressa’s speech, “quietly requested clarification” of her on the stage, and then walked off stage when she did not respond (apparently, the clarification requested involved her retaking the microphone and revising the speech she had just finished giving to Zarchi’s specifications; are such requests for “clarification” by clergy a regular practice at Harvard commencements? It is one I have never experienced at the many commencements I’ve attended.) The report’s account of commencement says nothing about the fact that Chabad Rabbi Zarchi was embroiled in controversy back on November 7, 2023, for giving a speech in which he seemed to call both Hamas terrorists and Hamas supporters not a “human” but “an animal... below an animal.” The precise intended reference and meaning of his words notwithstanding—the subject of much semantic discussion, they seem pretty nasty to me—in this speech and elsewhere he made very clear that Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was “antisemitic” and should be decertified by the university, with its protests banned from campus. (Note: Zarchi’s comment and his anti-PSC advocacy was noted earlier in the report, on p. 110; but its obvious connection to his defensive reaction to Ressa’s speech is never drawn.) That many Jewish leaders on campus disagree strongly with Zarchi—who has collaborated extensively with Bill Ackman’s crusade against Harvard, and who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July of 2024—was also unmentioned in this narrative. Perhaps most important, the report says nothing about the fact that the overall frame of Ressa’s entire speech was the responsibility of all students to be their “best selves” and to work together, with compassion and understanding, to make the world a better place. To reduce that speech to the identity-obsessed concerns of its critics is to engage in exactly the kind of small-mindedness that the report elsewhere decries. Obviously, the report is about much more than this one commencement episode, and should not be judged by its treatment this one episode. But what it says about Ressa’s Commencement Address is so strikingly tendentious and misleading, that you have to wonder how this account ever made its way into a report claiming to be so very academic and serious, and what this means for the other narratives recounted in the report. Maria Ressa is a world-renowned journalist and human rights activist. While she has suffered persecution in her own country, and while she surely is hated and even targeted by authoritarians the world over, she is not likely to be materially harmed by the denunciations of Harvard’s Chabad rabbi or the displeasure of Harvard’s top donors and administrators. But NYU’s Logan Rozos, and many others like him, experience severe repercussions for saying similar things. U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz—a Democrat who has joined with Elise Stefanik and other Trumpists to attack so-called “antisemitism” on American campuses—was quite candid about Rozos: “He lied to the university... [and] everyone listening. There is no genocide going on in Israel... But at the end of the day, that’s up to the university whether they give him his diploma or not. You know, in fact, they can give him his diploma, it’s not going to matter. Good luck getting a job. That was a stupid, selfish thing, ruined the ceremony for a lot of families.” The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others who have spoken out for Palestinians and against Israel represent an even more serious form of intimidation and punishment for those who dare to violate the 11th Commandment. And make no mistake, while courts have recently ordered the release of many of these individuals pending resolution of their court cases, their cases are still being litigated, and the administration continues to pursue such deportations through every legal means available even as it pushes the boundaries of legality. In the first instance, it is foreign students and noncitizens more generally who are threatened by such efforts. But in a broader sense, all students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large. This intellectual virus is not circulating randomly. As The New York Times recently reported, The Heritage Foundation has been busy at work planning and then putting into effect its “Project Esther,” designed, as the Times puts it, “to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.” While “Esther” is largely, though not exclusively, the work of right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, it dovetails neatly with the post-October 7 efforts of the Anti-Defamation League to castigate all pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic” and to pressure campus leaders to crack down on such activity. Most importantly, these efforts have the full-throated backing of the Trump administration and its supporters in red states, like my own state of Indiana, all across the country. Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness, and contributes to the steady weakening of the freedom of expression and association that is at the heart of any decent, liberal democracy. Such conduct is not academic leadership. It is craven submission to ideological small-mindedness and political pressure.

    Bloomberg Journalist Among Anti-Israel Radicals Arrested for Storming Columbia Library

    Bloomberg journalist Jason Kao was among those arrested at Columbia University during a violent takeover of the school's Butler Library earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Kao, a graphics reporter for the news outlet and Columbia alumnus, was one of the 81 radicals collared at the library after the violent mob clashed with security officials. During the unrest, rioters injured two, passed out pamphlets endorsing Hamas's violence, vandalized and damaged the library, and renamed the building after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with the Israel Defense Forces. Jason Kao (https://www.nytco.com)   Screenshot (Bloomberg) "I currently work for Bloomberg News, where I use data and data visualization to cover the news," Kao wrote on his personal website. Kao was employed by Bloomberg News as of May 1, based on a social media post from a colleague. A Bloomberg spokesperson told the Free Beacon on Monday that Kao is no longer employed by the company. An NYPD spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that Kao was cuffed and charged with "criminal trespassing in the third degree," suggesting he wasn't simply covering the Butler Library storming as a journalist. Kao did not respond to a request for comment. Kao, who graduated from Columbia in 2022, previously worked for the New York Times as a reporter in the graphics department. During his time there, Kao squabbled over the paper's return-to-office policies following the COVID-19 pandemic and participated in a one-day strike in December 2022 to demand double-digit salary increases. He left the Gray Lady in May 2023. Kao has also worked as a fellow for the Texas Tribune, a graphics editor for ProPublica, and a contributor to the Columbia Daily Spectator. While his work at the Times and Bloomberg have covered a variety of topics, including the war in Ukraine and New York City's congestion pricing program, Kao's personal website is exclusively devoted to negative coverage of Israel's war in Gaza. The X account "@cow_portal," which belonged to Kao, appears to have posted frequently about Israel and Gaza, according to cached Google search results. The account also appears to have been recently nuked, with a colleague tagging him in an X post on May 1, a week before he joined the library raid.     A total of 81 people were arrested during the May 7 library demonstrations, according to a list obtained by the Free Beacon. The miscreants ran the gamut and included repeat offenders, celebrity nepo baby Ramona Sarsgaard, avant-garde artists, and a disproportionately large contingent of people who identify as "they/them." At least one person arrested was born outside the United States, which could raise Trump administration's ire. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has made combating anti-Semitism on college campuses a priority. His administration has already canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia as punishment for the university's failure to rein in anti-Semitism and violent student groups that have openly supported Hamas. The post Bloomberg Journalist Among Anti-Israel Radicals Arrested for Storming Columbia Library appeared first on .

    'Corpse of the Phallus,' Black Latex, and Circus Performers: Meet The Avant-Garde Artists Arrested For Violently Storming Columb

    Before Isaiah Decastro Nash was arrested for storming a Columbia University library, the philosophy undergraduate dabbled in poetry. "The primordial trauma of existence is the death and rot of God. The corpse of God; the corpse of Death; the corpse of Time; the corpse of the Phallus," he wrote in "Sociotraumatics," a 2024 poem published in Gadfly, Columbia's undergraduate philosophy magazine. "The corpse of God is the corpse of the decaying phallus." Much of the screed focused on religion, something Nash evidenced a curious relationship with. "The Sabbath is the destruction of civilization. It is the non-time—the non-place—in which we actively construct Godhead; in which automatic event wages war on the sacred. It is the subconscious repetition of the retrospective end-of-time that maximizes the sacrificial," he wrote. Nash was just one of a bevy of avant-garde writers, artists, and eccentrics arrested for storming Butler Library last week, a Washington Free Beacon review of online records found. Roughly 80 radicals stormed the Columbia building, renamed it after a terrorist, injured two security officials, damaged bookshelves, and distributed pamphlets praising Hamas before they were arrested. One arrested student, Ridwana Rahman, wants you on your knees. Rahman, a Muslim Bangladeshi and first-generation American born in Portland, Oregon, is in the second year of her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia, according to her website. One of her pieces the Ivy League university showcased in 2024, "Points of Contact (or, Who are you on your hands for?)," left little to the imagination, featuring "a low-hanging self-portrait photograph of her body clad in black latex juxtaposed with a series of glazed black tiles made of porcelain," according to a Columbia press release. (@thelegacyavenue / Instagram) "I’m interested in being able to control the audience," Rahman said. "To see people get on their hands and knees—to kneel down with their body just to see my image—it reminds me of the power that I hold. I want a level of ambiguity, but I also want a very direct correlation between sex and religion and the photo establishes that." While Rahman likes making people look down, her fellow arrestee, Anais Robledo Murillo, prefers having them look up. Murillo, a Columbia College student in the Earth Institute department, serves as a special events and tech coordinator for the Columbia Circus Collective—the university’s first and only student-led organization dedicated to circus arts. Anais Robledo Murillo (@uptownaerialarts / Instagram) "Anais is a sophomore at cc studying climate and sustainability! she’s been obsessed with aerial rope since she was 16 and is so excited to share that passion with her columbia community," her bio on the collective's Instagram account reads. Murillo's own Instagram is a tribute to her rope talents. Then there's Miriam Vonnahme, a self-described "white abolitionist dyke" who holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sexuality, Gender, and Queer Studies from Portland State University, is a graduate student with Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race—though she's since been removed from the school's directory. Still, Vonnahme's public writings come with all the requisite trimmings such an academic pedigree would inspire. "Hegemonic Christianity functions as a colonial religion that is weaponized to reify itself in the maintenance of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy," she wrote in a 2021 article for Geez magazine. "I find much political utility in underscoring the connections between liberation theology movements and the struggle for Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) abolition. Both demand the 'end of the world' as we know it, and are sustained by generating utopian imagination from the margins in the service of present liberation struggles." Another arrested student, Gabriela Quintero, has similarly pushed far-left rhetoric. The Columbia graduate student and dancer graduated from Barnard College in 2024 with a degree in women's gender and sexuality studies, according to that year's commencement program. (Gabriela Quintero) She's also no stranger to campus activism. In 2020, Quintero affixed her name to a petition complaining about the Barnard course "Big Problems: Making Sense of 2020." The course focused on "the history of systemic racism, social justice, healthcare, and equity," Wendy Schor-Haim, director of the First-Year Writing Program and senior lecturer in the English Department, said in a press release. Quintero, however, said the course was problematic and could be traumatic for students of color. "Its commodification and foregrounding of Black trauma," the letter read. "Forcing BIPOC students to undergo emotionally and mentally exhaustive discussions about their lived trauma and experiences, which causes irrevocable harm to already vulnerable students" Two other arrested students were officers in the Columbia University Buddhist Association alongside Mohsen Mahdawi, an anti-Israel student activist facing deportation. Mahdawi served as co-president of the Buddhist group, which aims to help Columbia students "[f]oster compassion, loving joy, and equanimity in our daily lives." Yet people who knew him said he "bragged about friends and family wanting to kill Israelis" and said "his job in the refugee camp was to make weapons." He also called his fellow copresident, Alejandro Menjivar, "my brother," according to a Buddhist publication. Menjivar, for his part, gushed over Mahdawi. "An image a lot of us carry is of him sitting. I’ve sat with him a lot. At meetings, after the meditation period ended, the teacher would begin the dharma talk, but Mohsen would just continue meditating, sitting upright in the lotus posture with his eyes closed. And he would be smiling," Menjivar said during an April interview. Roughly two weeks later, Menjivar was arrested for joining the violent mob that stormed Butler Library. He wasn't the only warrior monk in Mahdawi's curiously radicalized Buddhist club. Anjana Peddireddi, the club's vice president, was also arrested during the recent unrest. Peddireddi is a Columbia student pursuing degrees in sociology and statistics. In 2020, she won $500 in an essay competition sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Anjana Peddireddi (Columbia University Buddhist Association) None of the arrested students responded to requests for comment. Columbia declined to comment. The post 'Corpse of the Phallus,' Black Latex, and Circus Performers: Meet The Avant-Garde Artists Arrested For Violently Storming Columbia Library appeared first on .

    Anti-Israel Rutgers Center Teaches Students How To Thwart ICE

    A Rutgers University center under congressional investigation for its connections to anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism activity is advising Palestinian and Muslim students about how to subvert U.S. immigration officials, suggesting they lock smartphones and take other "digital hygiene" measures to avoid deportation. The Rutgers Law School Center on Security, Race and Rights, led by Palestinian-American activist Sahar Aziz, hosted so-called Know Your Rights seminars on April 28 and May 7 as a response to the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students involved in anti-Israel campus protests and others who harbor pro-Hamas sympathies. Golnaz Fakhimi, the speaker at the April 28 event, encouraged students "not to have Face ID or thumbprint ID turned on, to set passcodes that are long and strong" in order to prevent immigration officials from accessing smartphones during immigration stops. Fakhimi, who referred during the seminar to the "ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," informed students that federal agents at airports and border checkpoints are able to use forensic tools to access "content that is deleted from a device." The May 7 seminar, led by Raquel Aldana of the University of California, Davis, asserted that universities "shouldn’t be collaborating with ICE" by providing information on international students and faculty. She also called on schools to "clearly define what is a private space within universities, like dorms, classrooms, clinics, labs," to prevent student interactions with ICE officials. While Know Your Rights seminars are common in the nonprofit field, the Rutgers events could raise questions for the public university, which receives around $400 million in federal funds each year. Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee launched an investigation last month into a nonprofit group, the Chinese-American Planning Council, for offering guidance on how to evade ICE officials. The Department of Education is investigating whether Rutgers and dozens of other universities have emboldened anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activities on their campuses. The Trump administration froze $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard University for its failure to curtail anti-Semitic incidents on campus, and struck agreements with schools like Columbia University. Rutgers has not yet been targeted in the crackdown. Rutgers received more than $1 billion from the state of New Jersey for its overall budget last year, and more than $560 million from the federal government to fund research projects. The Center on Security, Race and Rights operates under Rutgers Law School, where Aziz teaches courses on national security, "Islamophobia," and critical race theory. The center receives half of its budget through the Rutgers University chancellor's budget and through the Rutgers University Foundation, a charity operated by the school. Rutgers has not yet been targeted in the crackdown. But House and Senate Republicans are already investigating the center, over what lawmakers have said is its record "of virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism." In one high-profile incident, the center organized an event on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with Sami Al-Arian, a former professor who was convicted of helping fund Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Many of the center’s faculty advisers have cheered the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Joseph Massad, a Columbia University professor who called the October 7 attacks "awesome," "astounding," "striking," "innovative," and "victories of the resistance," is a distinguished fellow at the Rutgers center. At a Rutgers center event in December 2023, Massad falsely claimed the Israeli military, not Hamas, engaged in the "indiscriminate strafing" of music festival attendees attacked on Oct. 7. Susan Akram, another Rutgers center distinguished fellow, has called Hamas and Hezbollah "resistance movements." Lara Sheehi, a Rutgers center faculty adviser, has referred to Hamas as "martyrs" while endorsing their "armed resistance" against Israel, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Aziz, who launched the center in 2018, has faced scrutiny for downplaying the Hamas attacks and condemning Israel. After Hamas attacked Israel in May 2021, Aziz signed an open letter with other activists that stated, "We are in awe of the Palestinian struggle to resist violent occupation, removal, erasure, and the expansion of Israeli settler colonialism." During the May 7 seminar, Aziz decried what she called the "Israelization of American foreign policy," and asserted that the Trump administration is targeting largely Palestinian and Muslim students who are "trying to stop the genocide that’s happening right now in Gaza." And she called on Jewish-American groups to oppose what she called the Trump administration’s "fascist" crackdown on anti-Israel students. "It’s so important for Jewish-American groups who oppose this type of fascist behavior by groups claiming to be trying to protect Jews that they openly and vocally respond to that and reject that," she said. Rutgers did not respond to a request for comment. The post Anti-Israel Rutgers Center Teaches Students How To Thwart ICE appeared first on .

    Zionist Militant Group Responsible for ICE Arrest of Pro-Palestine Former Student

    A Massachusetts court ruled that the detention of a former student who expressed pro-Palestine views was unconstitutional and that it was a punitive measure triggered almost solely by a complaint from the Zionist militant group Betar. Late last week, a judge ruled that a former student at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), detained unlawfully by ICE, be released, providing the first court admission that Zionist extremist groups are working with U.S. authorities to violate free speech rights. The former student in question is Efe Ercelik, a Turkish national who entered the U.S. on an F-1 student visa. After a physical altercation with a Jewish student during a protest in late 2023, the American corporate media and pro-Israel groups pointed to his case as evidence of rampant attacks against Jewish students on campus. However, the narrative originally propagated around Ercelik’s case also fell apart under further scrutiny. On April 8, the Betar Worldwide group, which has a history of support for terrorism, posted a screenshot of a profile made of Ercelik by the infamous Canary Mission, known for doxing pro-Palestine university students, writing that they had submitted his name for deportation. According to a 31-page court document released in the case, the former student’s name was indeed submitted to the authorities. Within 24 hours, the deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services then sent a memo to ICE. On April 10, the Department of Homeland Security issued an administrative warrant for Ercelik’s arrest. A week later, ICE agents showed up at the former student’s home demanding that he surrender himself for arrest. Yet, when the agents were asked to present a warrant, they stated they didn’t have one. That is when they began issuing threats to Ercelik, telling him that if he “declined to surrender himself to those officers’ custody, regardless of their lack of a warrant, they would ensure that Petitioner will be charged with a federal hate crime and spend many years in federal prison.” According to the court’s ruling, Ercelik’s detention was carried out in reaction to his political beliefs, which are protected under the First Amendment, and was “almost exclusively triggered” by the Betar group. The judge in the case, Angel Kelley, wrote in her decision that the incident “rises to the level of near absurdity.” Judge Kelly found that ICE's arrest of Mr. Ercelik was intended to punish him for pro-Palestinian advocacy. The DHS warrant issued 48 hours after Betar's tweet said it was because he had been placed into removal proceedings. That was a lie. It didn't happen until 15 days later. pic.twitter.com/PHleUD3C9i — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) May 9, 2025 In a later post on X, Betar Worldwide stated on the ex-student’s case that “there’s [sic] so many of these bastards nationwide he’s an egregious one in Massachusetts, a rotten state.” Relevant to the case was that on Nov. 3, 2023, Ercelik had been involved in a physical altercation with pro-Israel protesters, expressing his pro-Palestinian stance before seizing and cutting up an Israeli flag, in addition to using profanities. At the time, the corporate media and commentators accused Ercelik of “punching a Jewish student.” He was arrested and charged with assaulting a Jewish student at the rally, but pleaded not guilty. Later, he would plead guilty to misdemeanors that required no jail time, and his visa was not revoked. The accusations of assault are still being spread on social media, despite there being at least three different accounts of what was said to have transpired—one which claims that a Jewish woman was kicked, another alleging that Ercelik spat at a pro-Israel student and used a kitchen knife to stab the Israeli flag. None of these accounts were proven. For months after the incident, the case received little attention. That was until April 2024, when student encampments spread from Columbia University across the country. On April 30, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed a 60-page civil rights complaint against UMass, claiming that an “antisemitic climate” existed at the university. The ADL obsessively focused on the case, pointing to it as evidence of college campus antisemitism. Jonathan Greenblatt, the pro-Israel group’s chief executive, remarked: “Even after a violent antisemitic assault on campus, UMass has done nothing to make Jewish students feel safe and, infuriatingly, this assault is the tip of the iceberg—part of a persistent pattern of enabling hate against Jews.” The ADL complaint contradicted what Hillel, the Jewish college campus group responsible for organizing the rally where the incident occurred, stated at the time. The pro-Israel student group made it clear that they believed “there is no indication of any ongoing security threat.” “We know this incident is disturbing to many of us, particularly during a time when tensions, emotion and concern are heightened on our campus. But we must not let the most extreme voices and actions create undue fear or dominate the campus climate,” UMass Hillel wrote in a statement, indicating that the incident, which they believed was an assault, was isolated. There are still allegations spreading on social media accusing Ercelik of carrying out a violent assault, thanks to articles and posts making this claim which have not been corrected to match the updated facts. Instead, the allegations have worked to justify the unconstitutional arrest of a pro-Palestine advocate at the hands of an extremist group that engages in threatening tactics and glorifies murder. Feature photo | A rally attended by Betar members in Paris, February 9, 2025. Cesar Vilette | Ola News | Sipa via AP Images Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Zionist Militant Group Responsible for ICE Arrest of Pro-Palestine Former Student appeared first on MintPress News.

    Judge Gives Powerful Warning While Freeing Pro-Palestine Protester

    The Vermont judge who on Wednesday ordered the release of a Columbia University student arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave a grave warning about the Trump administration’s McCarthyist crackdown on free speech. In his sharply worded 29-page decision ordering Mohsen Mahdawi’s release, Judge Geoffrey Crawford wrote that in addition to the fact that the graduate student was not a flight risk and presented no danger to his community, the judge had also considered the “extraordinary setting” in which his arrest was made in the ruling. Legal residents—not charged with crimes or misconduct—are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day,” Crawford wrote. “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 that led to the deportation of hundreds of people suspected of anarchist or communist views.” He referred to judicial decisions that had helped bring “an end to the moral panic that gripped the nation and its officials.” “Similar themes were sounded during the McCarthy period in the 1950s when thousands of non-citizens were targeted for deportation due to their political views,” he said, referring to a 1950 Supreme Court dissent that condemned the “menace to free institutions” presented by such cases. “The wheel of history has come around again, but as before these times of excess will pass. In the meantime, this case … is extraordinary in the sense that it calls upon the ancient remedy of habeas to address a persistent modern wrong.” Crawford presented a strong defense for Mahdawi’s speech, writing that “even if he were a firebrand, his conduct is protected by the First Amendment. “The court is aware that he has offended his political opponents and apparently given rise to concerns at the State Department that he is an obstacle to American foreign policy. Such conduct is insufficient to support a finding that he is in any way a danger as we use that term in the context of detention and release,” Crawford added. Mahdawi, who had committed the heinous crime of activism and founded Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union, offered a sharp condemnation of the very kind of antisemitism of which he stood accused, during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly invoked vague “antisemitic activities” as justification for the arrests of several students who have committed no crimes and whom the government hopes to deport. Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his child while being detained in Louisiana; Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained over an op-ed, even though the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity; and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who is now held in a Texas detention center, all remain in custody.

    Inside the Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review

    Legally dubious law review: Writing the foreward to the Harvard Law Review's Supreme Court issue is arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. Since 2018, only one white author has penned it—and that's no coincidence, according to internal documents obtained by our Aaron Sibarium. They show that race "plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged." When soliciting and evaluating articles, for example, editors have asked whether a submission will "promote DEI values," cite scholars from "underrepresented groups," and have "any foreseeable impact in enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion." When it comes to the editors themselves, nearly half "are chosen by a 'holistic review committee' that has made the inclusion of underrepresented groups'—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its 'first priority.'" "The documents from the law review could create a new line of attack for the [Trump] administration as the fight over federal funding escalates and invite litigation from private plaintiffs eager to join the pile-on," writes Sibarium. "Such plaintiffs would have no shortage of ammunition." READ MORE: Exclusive: Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Things fall apart: Student activists at Columbia were supposed to launch another encampment at 1 p.m. Thursday afternoon. When their plans leaked, administrators threatened arrests. Then 1 p.m. came and went with no encampment. Somebody should have thought of this approach two years ago! That doesn't mean there were no fireworks around Columbia's campus. Anti-Israel student groups at Columbia, including its Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, urged their members to "show up" for a demonstration at nearby City College of New York, where keffiyeh-clad students established a "liberated zone"—and got pepper sprayed by police. The leaked encampment plans included a plot to pitch a second tent city tomorrow at Columbia's Manhattanville campus, the site of Columbia Business School. Unlike the main campus, it's publicly accessible, and organizers indicated they were willing to stay until they’re arrested. Stay tuned. READ MORE: Columbia Radicals Ditch Reported Encampment Plans After University Threatens Arrests Taking the mineral fight to ChiComs: China is the world's largest producer of critical minerals. It has leveraged that status to advance its geopolitical aims, issuing strict export controls on minerals like antimony, germanium, and gallium that the United States relies on for military purposes. In response, the Trump White House "is turning to a little known tool to fast-track federal approvals for a slate of mining projects it says are vital to shoring up domestic energy, technological, and defense supply chains," according to the Free Beacon’s Thomas Catenacci. At the center of the plans are 10 mineral exploration and mining projects, including some that would produce antimony, that the White House added to a federal permitting dashboard that comes with a streamlined permitting process. Officials say more will be added soon. "The action signals a significant departure from how previous administrations have utilized the federal permitting dashboard," writes Catenacci. "Since the bipartisan Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act created the tool a decade ago, the federal government has used it to fast-track just two mining projects." READ MORE: Trump Admin Accelerates Mining Projects as China Curbs Critical Mineral Exports Away from the Beacon: Hero: Harvard president Alan Garber told NBC's Lester Holt that he knows his university has an anti-Semitism problem but that he had "no choice" but to fight the Trump administration. The New York Times is out with a glowing profile of a deported Jamaican man—who was first ordered to leave the United States "after he was convicted of kidnapping in 2006." The post Inside the Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review appeared first on .

    Columbia Radicals Ditch Reported Encampment Plans After University Threatens Arrests

    Columbia University student radicals abandoned their plans to launch an anti-Israel encampment Thursday afternoon after the Ivy League school warned that participants could face disciplinary actions, including arrest. Instead, agitators pushed protesters to join unrest elsewhere in New York. During one of those protests, at City College of New York, police pepper sprayed keffiyeh-clad students clashing with law enforcement. Radicals there, about a mile from Columbia’s main campus, had established a "liberated zone," while dozens of additional agitators gathered outside the campus gates and taunted police.   : Earlier this afternoon, NYPD pepper sprayed a group of anti-Israel agitators at the City College of New York, located just over a mile away from Columbia’s main campus. pic.twitter.com/MFDm4XfUP8 — Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) April 24, 2025 In an Instagram post promoting the event, NYC Students for Justice in Palestine wrote that "escalated resistance is a responsibility, a duty, and a necessity." They added, "We follow in the lead of Palestine and the resistance, who show us what true bravery and courage means." Several anti-Israel student groups at Columbia, including its Palestine Solidarity Coalition, Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs Palestine Working Group encouraged their members to "show up" for the protesters. A City College of New York spokesman said the school was restricting campus access. "We are aware of protests in and around City College. Extra public safety officers are on campus and access to the campus is restricted to CCNY employees and students with ID," the spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. Meanwhile, almost six miles away from Columbia, the Ivy League school’s most notorious anti-Semitic campus group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, cosponsored a protest in Washington Square Park. It was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., the same time the Columbia encampments were supposed to begin.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by NYC Students for Justice in Palestine (@nyc.sjp) From the park, several dozen keffiyeh-clad protesters marched nearby to New York University. On Tuesday night, Columbia students planned two encampments at a secret meeting in a Brooklyn community center—one beginning Thursday at 1 p.m. and a second that would launch Friday. The first failed to materialize after the university threatened disciplinary actions—and possibly arrest—if they moved forward with their plan to launch the encampments. "We have been made aware of possible plans to establish encampments on Columbia’s campuses. We want to clearly communicate that camping and encampments on Columbia’s campuses are prohibited by University Policy," Columbia’s public safety department announced in a university-wide email Wednesday evening. "Participants will be instructed to disperse," the email continued. "Individuals who refuse to disperse will be identified and sanctions, including potential removal from campus and possible arrest, may be applied." The Columbia agitators’ decision to back down Thursday allowed Claire Shipman, Columbia’s new acting president who promised to enforce policies restricting unsanctioned and disruptive protests, to avoid having to make good on her administration’s threat. But she could face a serious test if the radicals move forward with an encampment on Friday. Organizers plan to establish it on the Manhattanville campus, which, unlike the main campus, is publicly accessible, and aim to stay indefinitely, according to NBC News. Nearly a year ago, anti-Israel agitators first set up tents, terrorizing Columbia’s campus for two weeks and culminating in the violent takeover of Hamilton Hall. It took the university nearly a year to punish the students involved with multi-year suspensions, expulsions, and temporary degree revocations. Last year’s encampments also provided the Trump administration with significant ammo in its decision to freeze over $430 million in Columbia’s federal funding and place demands on the university to curb campus anti-Semitism. Asked what measures the school is taking to prevent students from setting up encampments, a Columbia spokeswoman pointed the Free Beacon to a Wednesday statement. "Our focus is on protecting the safety of our community and ensuring that the University is able to proceed normally with all academic activities. We are closely monitoring, as always, for any disruptions, and campus activities are currently proceeding as usual," the statement read. "Encampments are prohibited under University Policies and participating in an encampment may also trigger University Rules violations. Any violations of University Policies and Rules will be addressed immediately according to our procedures." A "March from City College to Columbia" is also planned for Friday afternoon. "As a fascist Trump/Elon regime cuts our universities’ funding, sends ICE on students, and threatens free speech, our universities must make a choice: stand with fascism or stand with us," a flyer for the protest reads. The post Columbia Radicals Ditch Reported Encampment Plans After University Threatens Arrests appeared first on .

    Columbia Threatens Arrests If Student Radicals Move Forward With Planned Anti-Israel Encampments

    Columbia University warned student radicals that they could face disciplinary actions—and possibly arrest—if they move forward with their plans to launch anti-Israel encampments. "We have been made aware of possible plans to establish encampments on Columbia’s campuses. We want to clearly communicate that camping and encampments on Columbia’s campuses are prohibited by University Policy," Columbia’s public safety department announced in a university-wide email Wednesday evening. "Participants will be instructed to disperse," the email continued. "Individuals who refuse to disperse will be identified and sanctions, including potential removal from campus and possible arrest, may be applied." Columbia students secretly gathered at a Brooklyn community center Tuesday night to plan two encampments, NBC News reported. The first would launch at 1 p.m. Thursday on the university’s main Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan. Organizers aim to disperse before nightfall or before police can intervene, according to NBC News. The second encampment would go up Friday at the nearby Manhattanville campus with plans to go on indefinitely. The organizers, using aliases and concealing their faces, advised participants to avoid wearing masks upon arriving on campus because it would tip off campus security. Columbia, in its Wednesday email, warned that public safety officials would "immediately take steps to remove tents" and restrict "access to affected areas." If the student radicals move forward with their plans, they will serve as a major test for the university’s new acting president, Claire Shipman, who has promised to enforce Columbia’s policies that place strict limits on unsanctioned and disruptive protests. The plans come a year after agitators first set up encampments, terrorizing Columbia’s campus for two weeks and culminating in the violent takeover of Hamilton Hall. It took the university nearly a year to punish the students involved with multi-year suspensions, expulsions, and temporary degree revocations. Last year’s encampments also provided the Trump administration with significant ammo in its decision to freeze over $400 million in Columbia’s federal funding and place demands on the university to curb campus anti-Semitism. The post Columbia Threatens Arrests If Student Radicals Move Forward With Planned Anti-Israel Encampments appeared first on .

    Harvard University Extended a Fellowship Offer to Ousted Columbia Prof Accused of Anti-Israel 'Indoctrination'—Then Rescinded It

    Harvard University quietly extended a fellowship offer to a former Columbia University professor who was let go after a Wall Street Journal exposé accused him of "pro-Palestinian indoctrination"—then revoked it without explanation, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Kayum Ahmed, a former director at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, posted a screenshot last week of his April 3 acceptance letter as a fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy, complete with official letterhead and executive director Maggie Gates’s name and title. "I'm pleased to share that I’ve been appointed as a Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, for the 2025–2026 academic year," Ahmed wrote in a caption accompanying the screenshot. When the Free Beacon reached out about the offer on Monday, a Harvard Kennedy School spokesman said it was "made prematurely" without going through the proper "vetting process" and was "under review." The next day, the spokesman said Harvard had revoked Ahmed's fellowship. "After completing our standard review and vetting process, Harvard Kennedy School has decided not to move forward with this fellowship," the spokesman said. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of personnel matters, all fellowship candidates are evaluated on many factors—including their suitability to the role, commitment to free and open inquiry, integrity, and ability to add to the intellectual life of the school." Though the spokesman did not explain what caused the decision, he did suggest that it was not based on Ahmed's controversial past at Columbia, saying, "As a school committed to free speech and ideological diversity, we do not disqualify candidates because of their views or because they are controversial." The reversal comes as Harvard engages in an escalating battle with President Donald Trump, having sued his administration Monday over its decision to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding in an attempt to quell campus anti-Semitism. For Ahmed, that battle—not a mistake in "process"—explains the school's fellowship offer U-turn. "So let's be honest: the real error—according to those pulling the strings—was that I refused to remain silent in the face of genocide," Ahmed wrote in a Wednesday LinkedIn post. "They want obedience. I want resistance." That "resistance" was the focus of the March 2024 Journal report, which said Ahmed indoctrinated his students to hate Israel through lectures that labeled the country a "colonial settler state" that has "oppressed indigenous populations" and "displaced" Palestinians, leading to "health consequences." "He puts the idea into everyone's head that the Jews stole the land and it should belong to the indigenous people," a graduate student who took the class told the Journal. That rhetoric, some students and faculty members said, showed Ahmed was "abandoning context, advocating a pro-Palestinian bias, spreading disinformation and expecting an adherence to anti-Zionism." A month after the Journal report, in April 2024, Columbia told Ahmed it would not renew his appointment. By July, Ahmed had begun a six-month stint as a visiting scholar with Birzeit University, a West Bank school that has hosted military parades in honor of Hamas. Until last month, the university partnered with a Harvard college that houses at least a half-dozen faculty members and affiliates who have defended Hamas's Oct. 7 attack and accused Israel of "genocide" and "terrorism" remain at the school, the Free Beacon reported. Harvard's Carr-Ryan Center nonetheless told Ahmed it was looking "forward to supporting your ongoing research and scholarship" in the since-rescinded acceptance letter. The fellowship’s application page also notes that the center seeks scholars "whose research and practice are aligned with the Center’s priorities." The Trump administration has explicitly named the center as one of Harvard’s programs "that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture." Ahmed, for his part, said he was "especially looking forward to working with Prof. Mathias Risse to examine some of the existential questions facing the human rights movement." Risse wrote that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack "did not come out of nowhere," described the Jewish state’s response as "ruthless," and urged people to recognize "the moral complexity of the situation in and around Gaza." Ahmed’s lessons at Columbia weren’t the first time he made controversial remarks. While heading the Open Society Foundations' public health portfolio, Ahmed accused Jews of becoming oppressors following the Holocaust. "Xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators," Ahmed said during a 2019 address at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite New York City private school. "I use the same example in talking about the Holocaust. The Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable." Ahmed did not return a request for comment. The post Harvard University Extended a Fellowship Offer to Ousted Columbia Prof Accused of Anti-Israel 'Indoctrination'—Then Rescinded It Without Explanation appeared first on .

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