Palestine: The Wall is Breached. Young Americans are pro-Palestinian

Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian. Why? Because, unlike their Zionist-misinformation captive elders, the Internet has liberated the truth and opened their eyes to the historical facts.

For the past several months of war between Israel and Hamas, US public opinion on the conflict appears to have shifted, except for one constant: a divide between the views of older and younger Americans has creeped up both during the war and in the years leading up to it.

A late October YouGov poll found that more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict — the only age bracket with that view (28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis — though even more sympathized with both peoples equally, 31 percent). Older groups were more likely to sympathize with Israelis than Palestinians or both groups equally, particularly those 65 and older. Only 14% of 18- to 29-year-olds thought it was “very important” for the United States to protect Israel, in contrast to two-thirds of those 65 or older. It appears that the unrelenting Israeli savagery against innocent civilians in Gaza has breached the wall of Israeli supremacy in the generally ignorant and biased American understanding of the conflict.

Two generations, two narratives

One expert says that each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel. Older generations have been impregnated by Zionist propaganda that has over-exploited the Holocaust to view Israel as a refuge for the Jews, exclusively seen as permanent victims.  Palestinians, on the other hand, who are the real victims of the creation of Israel, have been globally, though wrongfully, associated with third-worldism, terrorism and Islamism.

Germans and other Europeans committed the Holocaust, not the Palestinians. Instead of directing their anger and hatred at the innocent Palestinians whom they expelled into refugee camps and whose country they invaded and destroyed, Israelis should direct their anger and hatred at those Germans and other Fascist Europeanswho perpetrated the Holocaust.

The paradigm myth which Zionist propaganda has literally drilled (movies, newspapers, books, documentaries, and endless tales of Germany's barbarity against its own Jewish citizens) into the older generation of Americans as one of a people returning to their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution, has finally failed the test of reality in the minds of the younger generation. Persistent calls by Palestinian intellectuals to try and present the conflict in a more balanced and less biased way, combined with Israel's growing militarism, ultra-religiosity, expansionism, racism, and denial of a Palestinian identity searching for its own return to its ancestral homeland, have borne their fruit. Archival records, together with archaeological and genetic data, debunked the made-up and bible-garbage-founded links between the ancient Hebrews of Bronze Age Palestine and modern-day, newly converted, European Jews.

Israel's military victories against its Arab state neighbors (Syria, Egypt and Jordan), in 1948, 1967 and 1973, could no longer camouflage the horror of foreign colonial settlers from Europe displacing with untold violence the native indigenous Palestinian population. During the months before and after the 1948 war that created Israel, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by threats, massacres, rapes and looting, and about 600 Palestinian villages were literally erased from the maps of Palestine to either completely disappear or be replaced by Zionist "settlements". The language used does not need further explanation: Palestinian places are known as "villages", while Zionist places are known as "settlements"; this alone should tell you who is the real historical owner of the land and who is the savage colonial intruder.

But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with separation walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. Illegal in the eyes of the whole world, including by Israel's closest and only blind ally, the expansion of land theft, dehumanization and humiliation of the Palestinians, led the younger American and western generation to form a different idea of Israel than the one their elders had: The myth of the white European pioneer - a builder of Soviet-style Socialist collective settlements known as Kibbutzim who was "greening" the desert - slowly mutated into one of a repressive militaristic Israel that cultivated a racist attitude toward the lowlier "brown" Palestinians, that denied everything to the Palestinians, not just access to water and to their own lands, but also its freedom of movement, its life and livelihood, and its dignity trashed by unlawful imprisonment and unfair trials, under the military control of what had become a wealthy rich, nuclear-armed and malevolent power.

A racial justice lens

Joey Ayoub, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, podcaster and academic, says young Americans are more likely to conceptualize the Palestinian cause as a sister issue to U.S. efforts for racial justice. There is a “visual parallel,” he said: of an armed white soldier or police officer dominating a space inhabited by a darker-skinned populace with limited power, whether in a town in the occupied West Bank or a majority-Black neighborhood in the United States.

“It’s a natural ally to the Palestinian struggle, because it’s very similar if you think of it in terms of the bullet points being demanded — the right to dignity, the right to life and so on,” he said.

He sees 2014 as a pivotal year in a new generation’s understanding of the conflict: A war in Gaza killed about 2,250 Palestinians and 73 Israelis at roughly the same time as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., over the police shooting of an unarmed Black man.

Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said conflict between Israel and Palestinians seems to be seen by the young, especially on college campuses, as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor,” though a small portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of a non-European background. Some Israelis are the descendants of about 500,000 Arab and Iranian Jews who left for Israel between the 1950s and 1970s, not because they were persecuted as the filthy Zionists claim, but under intense pressure and with more than generous bribes by the arms of the Zionist movement, like the Jewish Agency, that wanted to increase the Jewish headcount at the expense of the native indigenous Palestinian headcount. I know this fact from personal experiences: In our neighborhood in Beirut, we lived side by side with Jewish families of pharmacists, photographers, teachers, bankers... During the 1960s, they would come to us one by one and tell us that "they have to leave for Israel because of pressure, scare tactics, and unimaginable sums of money". The Jewish community in Lebanon was a thriving one with schools, newspapers (The Alliance Israelite), summer resorts, and even a representative in the nascent Lebanese parliament. There were no pogroms, no mass expulsions... these were all lies spewed by Zionists to try and equalize their own pogroms against Palestinians.

Shifting Demographics and the Retreat of Religion

One explanation for the generational divide, experts said, was that fewer young Americans identify as conservative or Christian — demographics more likely to sympathize with Israel. The biblical mythology and its garbage supremacism and exclusivity from the Bronze Age, no longer speaks to younger generations. The advent of the Internet and the dissemination of archives and historical records, which younger Americans are more likely to consult than their ignorant parents (who to date cannot locate Israel on a map), revealed facts about the creation of Israel that were largely hidden or altered by Zionist propaganda. The Zionist made-up myths and lies were slowly debunked: the “biblical return”, the “land without people for a people without land”, the Palestinians’ “voluntary” abandonment of their villages and towns to become refugees, confounding a legitimate national resistance with terrorism and Islamist ideologies etc. The younger American generation awakened to the reality of Israel as one of many colonial enterprises (Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, India etc.) that always sought to portray their colonized indigenous victims as uncouth savages and barbarians that the colonizer had to civilize under the "white man's civilizational mission".

Moreover, the tenacity of a downtrodden unsophisticated Palestinian resistance in the face of the overwhelming support to the Zionists by the West forced a deeper reflection by the younger generation over the root causes of the conflict, and the realization that long before the Zionists invented the myth of Israel-as-refuge for Holocaust survivors, Israel was conceived in the late 19^th century as a Jewish me-too colonial exploitation and a western outpost in the heart of the nascent oil fields in the Middle East.

“Young adults in America think of Israel in the same way that they might think of Iran, or China or Russia,” Professor Hersh said, referring to a 2021 study of young Americans’ views on Israel compared with other nations.

Thirty years ago, support for Israel was associated more with Democrats than Republicans. This began to change during the George W. Bush presidency, after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when a perception on the American right developed “that Israel is the front line in this clash of civilizations — between a Judeo-Christian civilization and militant Islam,” the expert said.

Donald Trump’s support of Israel, including moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the more contested city of Jerusalem, furthered the trend, said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland.

“The fascinating thing there is that attitudes toward Islam and Muslims actually improved in America with the rise of Trump,” Telhami said. “People said, ‘We hate Trump, Trump hates Muslims, therefore, we like Muslims,' ” he said of progressives.

Another major factor in older generations’ feelings toward Israel is their greater religiosity. More than three-quarters of Americans 60-64 are Christian — with increasingly higher numbers for older brackets — compared with about half of adults under 30.

“It’s, I think, for many religious Christians, somehow a kind of atonement in supporting Israel and Zionism,” Waxman added. “Genuinely, a feeling of Israel as a consequence of this long history of Jewish persecution” by Christians. Some Christians, particularly among primitive ultra-religious evangelicals who believe that Israel was promised to the Jews by God, and that the return of the Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy of the events that will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ.

But even outside of this belief, the idea of Israel as a sacred land for Judeo-Christians has an emotional resonance that echoes back to the Christian Crusades – essentially an earlier Christian version of Jewish Zionism – in that both movements (1,000 years apart) tried to retrieve the Holy Land from the Muslims. This is simply not acceptable for the increasing number of secular young Americans.

“There’s a connection between Israel as they see it in the Bible and Israel that exists politically today,” Telhami said of some Christians. There is an association between place names like “Hebron,” “Jerusalem” and “the Galilee” with fictional Bible stories as much as with 21st-century geopolitics, and a long history of hearing this geography referred to as the home of the Israelites, particularly through the Old Testament.

Social vs traditional media

Dana El Kurd, a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, said different types of media consumption have probably played a role in how people have formed their views on the Middle East.

Americans 45 and older are most likely to get their news from TV networks and their websites, which almost exclusively endorse and propagate the Zionist narrative, while Americans younger than 45 are most likely to get their news through social media and the wider Internet that opened access to vast but heretofore unreported archives that balance out the traditionally pro-Israeli bias.

The regular use of TikTok in particular is correlated with criticism of Israel, a New York Times/Siena poll found this week.

Ayoub, whose interview podcast “The Fire These Times” with Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jewish, and Armenian perspectives has mostly Gen Z and millennial listeners, said that new forms of media facilitated access between content creators and consumers without “having a gatekeeper,” the latter being the biased TV networks and newspapers. Opening the floodgates of uncensored information began eating away at the Zionist narrative and allowed traditionally underrepresented groups to reach an audience, though it also had downsides, including “a huge uptick in misinformation” online.

TikTok has been criticized, especially by Republicans, because pro-Palestinian hashtags appear to be more popular than pro-Israel hashtags on the app. But the company says that phenomenon occurred organically, not because the company was intentionally manipulating its algorithm.

Overall public opinion in the United States traditionally supported Israel. But as recent demonstrations on college campuses around the country indicate, there is a fast growing generational divide. Even before the Hamas invasion of October 2023, there were distinct generational differences in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel. These differences are mirrored by divergences between older and younger Jewish Americans. There are signs that these gaps have widened since the current conflict began.

As the following polling from 2022 shows, older Americans have more favorable attitudes towards Israel than younger ones. A 2022 Pew survey found that 55% of Americans had a favorable view of Israel, while 41% had an unfavorable view. But a breakdown of these results reveals key generational and partisan differences. For example, only 41% of those aged 18-29 had a favorable view of Israel, compared to 69% of those aged 65 or older. Among those aged 30-49, 49% held a favorable view of Israel, and among 50–64-year old’s, 60% held a favorable view. Moreover, 71% of Republicans hold a favorable view of Israel, compared to only 44% of Democrats.

In March of 2023, Gallup found that Democratic sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%, even among Jewish Americans who have come to increasingly distance themselves from the growing right-wing Zionist Fascism of recent Israeli governments. In many conversations I've had with Jewish students on US campuses, they could not understand or accept Israel's evolution from a shelter nation to an aggressive expansionist hypermilitarized regime that claimed it did not need friends in its own neighborhood. Not a good recipe for survival on the long term.

A survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, found that 34% of Jewish respondents agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22% agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” When broken down by age, 43% under 40 agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” among 40-to-64-year old’s 32% agreed with the statement, and among those over 64, 27% agreed. When prompted with the statement “Israel is an apartheid state,” 38% under 40 agreed, compared to 23% of those 40-64, and 13% of those over 64. Finally, the statement “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians” resulted in 33% of those under 40 agreeing, in contrast to 18% of those aged 40-64, and 15% of those over 64.

Additionally, the poll found that 9% of Jewish voters agreed with the statement, “Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.” Among voters under 40, that proportion was higher with 20% agreeing.

Interestingly, 62% of Jewish voters support the U.S. sending aid to the Palestinian people while only 28% oppose it, apparently demonstrating widespread acknowledgement of the plight of many Palestinian civilians.

An Economist/YouGov poll conducted between Oct. 21 and 24 demonstrates this. Somewhat more people in the youngest group, aged 18-29 sympathize with the Palestinians (28%) than with the Israelis (20%), far different than among those 65 and over who support the Israelis by a margin of 65% to 6%, respectively.

These generational and partisan differences influence views about public policy. In a recent poll, Quinnipiac University found while Americans 65 and older support sending more military aid to Israel by a margin of 46 points (69 to 23%), younger Americans are almost as strongly opposed, with only 29% in favor and 65% opposed. Similarly, Republicans support aid by a margin of 35 points (65 to 30%) while Democrats do so by only 6 points (49 to 43%).

There is a concern that unites Americans across generational and partisan lines. When a close ally of the United States is at war, many people wonder if we will soon be at war too. The Quinnipiac poll found that 84% of the public — from young to old and from Democrats to Independents and Republicans — fears that the United States will be drawn by Israel into a war in the Middle East. It remains to be seen how this concern will find political expression if the conflict continues for more than a few more months or years.

While some younger Americans are increasingly aware of the hardships that many Palestinians have had to endure, others are echoing long-standing anti-colonial narratives calling, as does Hamas, for the outright destruction of Israel. At the same time, some young Jewish Americans feel distant from the story of Israel’s founding and the Jewish struggle to gain the recognition of a homeland. For many younger Americans, the current bloodshed is their first experience with a conflict that has been going on for more than 75 years. The coming months are likely to have a profound impact on the attitudes they will carry with them through their lives.

In short, the walls of the untouchable and forbidden Zionist city have been breached. Never in the 75 years of Israel's history have Americans so clearly distanced themsleves from Israel. The organic connection betwen the US and Israel, woven by decades of propaganda and brainwashing of a generally inward-looking and ignorant American population, is unraveling. The truth is out. The lies are exposed for all to see. Justice can perhaps finally prevail.

 

Lahoud-LaHood: From pro-Syrians in Lebanon to Zionists in America

The LaHood family is a notorious political and feudal family in Lebanon. For decades, one of the Lahouds (Lebanese spelling) was a puppet president of Lebanon working for the Stalinist Syrian regime and its occupation of the country. "LaHood" is the Americanization of the name: The reason for the uppercase H in the middle of the name is that the sound this letter represents is a deep guttural voiceless pharyngeal fricative - ح - in Arabic, and the American Lahouds decided to highlight it, even though Americans cannot pronounce that sound.

In America, one of the LaHoods founded another political family farm in Illinois, and one of his offspring by the name of Darin LaHood has become a Zionist in the US. From pro-Syria in Lebanon, they are pro-Israel in America. Loads of principles and high moral standards.

This is typical Lebanese duplicity where survival compels them to become chameleons, donning the colors of the substrate on which they tread. If Darin defends the pro-Palestinian protesters, he might lose the election next time. Just as his ancestors did in Lebanon: Emile Lahoud would not have become president of the country under the Syrian occupation if he did not kiss ass to the Assads in Damascus. So he criticizes the pro-Palestinian protesters to prove his loyalty to the Zionist powers-that-be in America.

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LaHood says Pro-Palestinians crossing the line

Linda Cook

Sun, May 5, 2024 

WHBF Davenport

Demonstrations on college campuses across the country about Israel’s war against Hamas continue to grow in number and in intensity. They are getting more confrontational.

University of Wisconsin Police and demonstrators got physical Wednesday when officers arrested more than two dozen people for violating the law against camping on campus.

Hundreds of officers in New York broke up a protest at Columbia University at the request of the administration after protestors started occupying a building on campus.

There was a more violent confrontation on the campus of UCLA between Palestinian supporters and Israel supporters. Classes were canceled there Wednesday.

Several members of Congress see the pro-Palestinian demonstrators as anti-Semitic, pointing to verbal attacks directed at Jewish students on campus.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act Wednesday to beef up federal anti-discrimination laws. It now moves to the Senate.

This response on Capitol Hill to those pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses pits the argument of free speech against anti-discrimination law.

It’s one of the topics host Jim Niedelman gets into with Illinois Congressman Darin LaHood.

“We’ve seen a disturbing trend of antisemitic activity on college campuses,” LaHood said. “We should never tolerate the type of hate that we’ve seen toward Jewish Americans and Jewish students on campuses across the country.”

When Shimon Peres Applied for Palestinian Citizenship

Former Israeli leader Shimon Peres Arrived in Palestine as a refugee seeking to become a Palestinian citizen of the Government of Palestine. There was no Israel back then, but there was a Palestinian State with a Palestinian Government. His example is but one of the many insidious ways by which the Zionists ended up raping Palestine and creating the state of Israel over its ashes. Nowadays, instead of these murderous Zionists begging to enter Palestine as refugees from the horrors inflicted on them by their fellow Europeans, they are killing and evicting their Palestinian hosts, declaring them terrorists for defending themselves, stealing their lands, and denying there ever was a Palestinian State or a Palestinian people.

When Shimon Peres authorized the 1985 bombing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia, one must presume he had forgotten his earlier oath of loyalty to the Palestinian government, which was revealed when his Palestinian citizenship application was uncovered.

MyHeritage is an Israeli startup which has used the Israeli State Archives to compile a database of over 67,000 citizenship requests filed between 1937 and 1947 during the British Mandate period.

Shimon Peres's Application for Palestinian nationality

The Palestinian Quds News Network uploaded the documents to Facebook on Monday, receiving, in turn, an outpour of comments condemning Peres and his role in perpetuating the Palestinian conflict.

The documents revealed that Shimon Peres, then known as Szymon Perski, had declared an interest in “agricultural work” before travelling to the territory of Palestine.

The former Israeli Prime Minister’s signature appears at the bottom of the application, including a statement which declares that, “I will be faithful and loyal to the Government of Palestine.”

Peres became one of the architects of the State of Israel, especially through creating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from what was a federation of Jewish terrorist organizations (Haganah, Stern Gang, Lehi group, etc.) that plundered Palestine, massacred, raped and expelled hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinian villagers, erased up to 600 Palestinian villages from the map, and are now, as we speak, continuing the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine.

 

Israel's Killing of Doctors Aims to Prevent Resurgence of Palestine

Leading Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh dies in Israeli prison

Kareem Khadder, Abeer Salman, Zeena Saifi and Kathleen Magramo, CNN
Fri, May 3, 2024

A prominent surgeon in Gaza has died in an Israeli prison after being held for more than four months, according to Palestinian prisoners’ groups, which decried his death as part of a “systematic targeting” of health care workers.

Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, was declared dead by Israeli prison authorities at Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank on April 19, according to a joint statement Thursday from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs.

Al-Bursh was arrested along with 10 other medical workers in December during the Israeli military ground invasion of the Jabalya refugee camp, CNN previously reported. He was taken away while treating patients in Al-Awda Hospital, according to the statement.

His body has not yet been released by Israeli authorities. The prisoner associations blamed Israel for his death, saying it was part of a “systematic targeting process against physicians and the health care system in Gaza,” according to the statement.

CNN has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for comment.

The death of the 50-year-old was “heartbreaking news for everyone, for his family, the medical staff at Al-Shifa Hospital, and for Dr. Adnan’s patients,” the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Marwan Abu Saada, told CNN.

“This is the last thing we expected, and it’s difficult for the human soul to bear this news,” he said. “Dr. Adnan loved life, was cheerful, and was loved by everyone.” Al-Bursh’s nephew Mohammad Al-Bursh told CNN in a phone interview that he found out about the death of his uncle at around 1 p.m. on Thursday from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.

“I didn’t know how to tell his wife and my father. News like this is hard to keep in… We are shocked, more than anyone can imagine. We are in pain,” he said.

The youngest of nine siblings, Dr. Al-Bursh wasn’t just a doctor, he was also a sports adviser for the Palestinian national soccer team, his nephew said.  He told CNN his uncle worked nonstop during the height of the war in Gaza, only taking an hour in the morning to jog and play sports by the beach.

Palestinian surgeon Al-Bursh (left) is pictured treating a wounded Palestinian child at a hospital in Gaza. - Ministry of Health in Gaza

“From October 10, 2023, he spent every moment he had at Al-Shifa hospital. He didn’t even see his wife until probably two weeks later,” Mohammed said.

During the first Israeli incursion into Al-Shifa hospital, Mohammad told CNN [that] Israeli soldiers told the medical staff, including Dr. Al-Bursh that they could either leave the hospital and go south, or face arrest.

He followed orders and went south temporarily, eventually returning to the north of Gaza when he felt the roads were safe, Mohammad said. Dr. Al-Bursh ended up moving from one hospital in Gaza to another, each always falling victim to Israeli incursions.

According to Mohammad, Dr. Al-Bursh had the option to flee and take refuge in shelters in Jabalya but was determined to keep working. Until he was detained by Israeli soldiers on December 14 last year. Mohammad said he tried to get information about his uncle’s arrest from authorities and lawyers but was kept in the dark.

Al-Bursh with his two children. Colleagues told CNN the doctor "loved life."

Allegations of physical and psychological abuse

Just like Mohammad, Abu Saada said he had earlier asked Israeli authorities about Al-Bursh’s detention but “didn’t receive any news.” Abu Saada was told that one of Al-Bursh’s fellow prisoners – who had since been released – said the surgeon had been tortured and was killed.

CNN cannot independently verify the claim that Al-Bursh was tortured in detention. However, testimony from dozens of Palestinians who have been released by Israel in past months alleges the widespread use of physical and psychological abuse of those detained by Israel during the war in Gaza.

The IDF has previously said it treats all detainees in accordance with international law.

An unpublished report compiled by the United Nations which CNN has obtained describes beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse and threats of sexual violence against both men and women detained by the Israeli military.

Earlier on Thursday, Israel released dozens of Gaza detainees via the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel. The release included the return of the body of Ismail Khadr, a Palestinian man from Gaza, who had also recently died in Israeli custody, the prisoner associations said in the joint statement. The total number of Palestinian detainees who have died in Israeli custody since October 7 rose to 18, the statement said.

Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks when militants killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and took more than 200 people hostage. Israel’s military response has since sparked a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that has inflamed opinion globally.

The seven-month bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 34,600 people, according to the Gaza health ministry. Half of the 2.2 million people in Gaza are on the brink of starvation and man-made famine is imminent, according to a scale used by United Nations agencies. Concerns are also heightened over an anticipated Israeli military operation in southern Gaza’s Rafah, prompting renewed calls for a ceasefire.

There has been fierce criticism of Israel’s actions in and around hospitals in Gaza, as medical groups and NGOs warn the health system in the territory is on the brink of collapse. Israel has defended its incursions at medical facilities in Gaza, alleging that Hamas fighters used hospitals to run military activities through a network of underground tunnels. Hamas and medical staff at various hospitals across Gaza deny the allegations, and Israel has been under significant international pressure to prove its claims.

Dr. Al-Bursh is survived by his five children, the youngest aged three, who hadn’t seen their father in nearly five months. “I walked into the mourning house yesterday and saw two of his kids jumping around expecting to see their father. They didn’t know that he was martyred,” his nephew told CNN, struggling to hold back tears.

The last post Dr. Al-Bursh posted on X was a cartoon image of him wearing his scrubs in the midst of Gaza’s destruction, with a note in Arabic that read, “We will die standing and we will not kneel… All that remains in the valley are its stones, and we are its stones.”

GOP's Incendiary Demagogue Mike Johnson is an "Outside Agitator"

 

Mike Johnson’s Ugly New Lie About Campus Protests Hands Dems a Weapon

Greg Sargent

Sat, May 4, 2024

This week, Mike Johnson floated a wild-eyed theory about the pro-Palestinian protests that have been rocking college campuses. The House speaker called on the FBI to get involved, adding: “I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or overseas entities.”

Because such talk has become routine, Johnson’s claim didn’t garner much media attention. But Democrats can and should act to compel media attention to it. And they have a big opportunity to do so: Johnson is planning high-profile hearings about the protests in coming weeks, which will include grilling university officials about whether administrators are doing enough to combat antisemitism on campuses.

Republicans are being open about their aim here, which is to divide Democrats between those who will defend nonviolent protest and those who fear association with campus unrest. And many Democrats are feeling deeply skittish about all this.

That’s in some ways understandable. But Democrats should view upcoming hearings as an opportunity to reset the argument. Johnson’s Soros quote—and others from Republicans just like it—give Democrats a way to go big. They should hold the GOP and the MAGA media complex accountable for the ugly reality that a whole range of white nationalism-adjacent ideas—especially ones with antisemitic overtones—have been festering inside the House GOP for years and have even been mainstreamed at the highest levels of Republican power.

“They don’t actually care about Jewish people or antisemitism,” Democratic Representative Daniel Goldman of New York told me, speaking of Republicans. “When they start using antisemitic tropes,” such as “globalist” and “elite” in this context, Goldman continued, it “shows their true colors.”

Many Republicans, including Johnson, have also trafficked in the “great replacement theory.” The most important Republican of all, Donald Trump, recently hosted antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort. As Goldman told me: “These are House Republicans who did not condemn Donald Trump for having dinner with a neo-Nazi.”

Johnson isn’t even the only GOP leader to push the Soros libel. Representative James Comer, chair of the Oversight Committee, says that “global elites are funding these hateful protests.” The language of GOP leaders has merged with that of the fringe: Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that Soros “funds” the “pro-Hamas protests.”

Several Jewish Democrats have already called this out, with one lawmaker labeling it “one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the world.” But Democrats can do more. At the hearings, which the political press will cover intensely, they can put those Soros quotes up on big screens and make Republicans defend them.

True, this is tricky political territory for Democrats right now. The party is divided over President Biden’s handling of Israel’s attack on Gaza, with some Democrats demanding that Biden withhold weaponry from Israel that could be used for its expected offensive in Rafah, arguing that the law requires this given Israel’s killing of civilians and blocking of humanitarian assistance to desperate victims.

Meanwhile, Democrats are divided over the protests themselves. When President Biden spoke out about them this week, he rightly distinguished between peaceful protest and unacceptable violence, casting the latter as a threat to civil society, but he conspicuously said little about how appallingly disproportionate the police response has been. Some Democrats seem reluctant to seriously defend peaceful dissent, which is what many of the protests have offered.

But surely Democrats can navigate their differences and get the balance on all this right. They can use the hearings to voice support for core, clarifying principles: It’s possible to condemn the horrifying outbreaks of antisemitism on campuses, some of them violent, while also insisting it isn’t inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians. It’s possible to draw a line between civil disobedience with a long tradition in American life and wanton, destructive violence—even if the exact location of that line is hard to pin down and will be deeply contested.

And it should be possible to call out the towering absurdity of the Republican effort to cast the Democratic Party as an aider and abettor of antisemitic violence. “It’s entirely navigable,” Goldman told me. “You can oppose U.S. policy toward Israel” and also “oppose antisemitism on campus,” he said, while also challenging those who are “exploiting antisemitism for purely partisan gain.”

Others might object that indicting Republicans over all this is a tough sell. After all, Johnson is himself denouncing antisemitism. How can he simultaneously be pushing an antisemitic trope? Did he really intend the Soros smear that way? The truth is we don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter what he intended.

What does matter is that this kind of talk has become tantamount to the air Republicans and many of their voters breathe. As the Anti-Defamation League explains, Soros’s identity is well known. He’s been elevated for decades by malignant nationalists across the world into a symbol of nefarious globalist forces seeking to manipulate fifth-column agitators to destabilize nations from within. People steeped in these ideas will receive such remarks in exactly that way.

Some Republicans have ventured another version of these claims, insisting Soros funds organizations behind the protests. But Politifact looked exhaustively at this and found that it relies on a comically tortured chain of logic. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, the connections are “so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.” The crucial point here is that such conspiracy theories often map onto a kind of a spectrum, where softer versions are available that allow proponents to invoke the most pernicious versions while retaining plausible deniability. That doesn’t make it any more defensible.

Indeed, this is exactly how “great replacement theory,” also works: Many Republicans, including Johnson, push a soft version that doesn’t accuse Jewish elites of promulgating the conspiracy. But that’s what untold numbers of people will hear, and its proponents know it.

On top of all this, Democrats should challenge the GOP push aggressively because Donald Trump is advancing a vile line of propaganda, in which violent protesters are getting lenient treatment while the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, are victims of overzealous law enforcement. More broadly, as Substacker Jamison Foser notes, Trump is openly campaigning on the language of authoritarians and dictators, and talk of an axis of “globalists” and domestic leftist agitators is a central pretext for threatening an authoritarian crackdown as president. The valorization of Trump’s paramilitary mobs as patriots and heroes alongside the demagoguing of protesters as the “real” enemy within, the vow to persecute “vermin” and prosecute treasonous political foes, the threat of mass removals of alien “invaders”—they’re all part of the same ugly story, and all should be contested vigorously.

So come on, Democrats: Use the hearings to remind everyone that Trump and the complicit GOP are the party that brought us the most serious outbreak of U.S. political violence in recent memory. Who do Republicans think they’re kidding, using campus protests to push their contemptible historical mythmaking designed to transparently sanitize that all away? Treat GOP demagoguery about the protests with the unbridled contempt it deserves.

 

Most Anti-Palestine Counter-Protesters are Outsider Zionist Rabble-Rousers

Many Jewish students are taking part in peaceful pro-Palestine protests across U.S. colleges and universities, making all the accusations of the protests being anti-semitic hollow and fabricated to discredit the protests. Some joined the encampments, celebrating Passover among the tents with fellow protesters.

At many of these pro-Palestine protests, counter-protesters are often seen hoisting Israeli flags and banners calling for a Zionist state "From the River to the Sea" as is enshrined in the Likud Party's Charter. A majority of these counter-protesters are not affiliated with the universities, but are dispatched by Zionist agencies as outside rabble-rousers with the specific objective of destroying the encampments and preventing the pro-Palestine tsunami from expanding. When interviewed, these people say without hesitation that they hope Israel would complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began in 1948 by massacring and expelling all the indigenous Palestinians out of their ancestral lands. Their objective is to establish a Jewish-only supremacist state over historic Palestine.

The pro-Palestinian encampments around the country have been largely peaceful, though there have been some clashes. Administrators and campus police at UCLA faced intense criticism Wednesday for failing to act quickly to stop an attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus by racist Zionist counter-demonstrators who converged from outside the campus and threw traffic cones and chairs, released pepper spray and tore down barriers. Some pro-Palestinian demonstrators fought back, and skirmishes continued for hours before outside law enforcement agencies were called to intervene.

Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has waged a brutal murderous campaign against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians along the way, according to the Health Ministry there. Israel has also seized the opportunity to conduct raids, assassinations, home demolitions and infrastructure destruction across the West Bank.

Protests in support of Israel or the Palestinians have bubbled up across the U.S. ever since Oct. 7. But the major wave of pro-Palestinian rallies on campuses kicked off two weeks ago, after more than 100 protesters were arrested at Columbia University in New York. They have demanded that colleges stop doing business with Israel and with companies tied to it.

Jewish Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are divided on whether Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military campaign has been acceptable, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in February.  Most ordinary American Jews are decent citizens and do not condone the Zionist violence and land theft against Palestine. To them, Israel cannot be their homeland; that is why they never emigrated there and preferred to remain as decent American citizens. They see Israel as a hellhole of ultra-religious barbarity, both Jewish and Muslim. Still, some do send their children to Israel for summer camp or even go there themselves as tourists.

Inside the Northwestern University protest encampment, the Jewish student Paz Baum held a Passover seder among the tents with the other pro-Palestinian protesters. She said her real Jewish religious values compelled her to protest over the war in Gaza. “I see a direct parallel between the experiences of my Jewish ancestors and the experience of the tens of thousands of Palestinians being slaughtered,” said Baum, whose great-grandparents fled pogroms in eastern Europe.

Baum also said the only antisemitism she witnessed was from several Zionist counter-protesters, mostly older adults who are neither students nor faculty and who confronted the encampment on Sunday.

As Baum held a sign reading “Jews for a cease-fire,” she said they lobbed antisemitic slurs at her. Other pro-Palestinian protesters have said accusations of antisemitism are bandied about merely to discredit their movement. The encampment at Northwestern reached an agreement with the university on Monday and cleared out.

The Jewish Colony in Palestine Under the Microscope for the First Time

It is hard not to watch events unfolding in Palestine and not question the root causes of the problem. Many detractors of Palestine want you to ignore the tragic history and focus only on the horrific events of October 7, 2023 as some sort of banal acts of violence that surged out of nowhere.

When Antonio Guterres of the UN first admitted that "there is a context" to the Hamas attack, Israeli officials pretended to be shocked and feigned outrage. But deep down, they are not idiots. They know that Hamas's attack is fundamentally an act of resistance against a decades-long oppression and occupation of the native indigenous Palestinian population by foreign and illegal white European migrants to Palestine .

But for all these decades, Zionist propaganda hammered the fact that the genocide of European Jews by Germans and their French, Italian, Spanish and other allies should be sufficient reason for the remaining Jews to carry out their own genocide against the Palestinian people. And the West, laden with guilt at having massacred millions of Jews and other "lower" subhumans, complied, remained silent, armed and protected those European Jews who were murdering Palesinians and driving them out of their homes, villages, towns and cities into squalid refugee camps, to artifically create a new state out of a myth from the Bronze Age of humanity.

The fundamental question is: Is it right for a former victim (European Jews) to victimize another people (the native indigenous Palestinians)? Is it generally acceptable to psychologists and psychiatrists, or is it considered legal by jurists that a molested, raped, abused individual in turn molests, rapes and abuses someone else who had nothing to do with the original crime? 

Justice in human societies is "organized revenge". In primitive societies, including western ones up to the early 20th entury, duels were an accepted form of justice. The two individuals in disagreement confronted each other, in front of witnesses, in a gun shootout whereby the one who is killed is a posteriori deemed to be the offending criminal, while the victorious killer is innocented by his victory. How could this have been acceptable? By invoking the primitive notion that God operates all this mayhem like a puppeteer, and killing and getting killed was some sort of divine justice.

If revenge is an accepted form of justice, regardless of whether it is organized or random, then the European Jews who devastated Palestine have chosen the wrong enemy to mete out revenge on it. Palestine did not carry out the Holocaust. Germans and other European Fascists did. So why, I ask, should the Palestinians pay the price for the Holocaust by being driven out of their homeland?

How come the European Jews, who suffered German barbarity without defending themselves and mounting a resistance of their own, and were led like sheep to the crematoria, suddenly became brave fighters against unsuspecting, unsophisticated, mostly rural Palestinian villagers and townspeople? In their native innocence, the Palestinians - like the Amerindians of the American continent - did not suspect that the initial trickle of illegal European migrants from 2,000 miles away would mutate into massive plundering savage hordes who would drive them out of their land under the pretext that they were angry at their own fellow Europeans who massacred them? 

Revenge is usually taken against the perpetrator, not against some other innocent person. In the latter case, revenge becomes terrorism. Indeed, the indigenous Palestinians became the scapegoats in a civil war, a conflict not their own, between German Jews and German Christians. Having behaved like cowards back in their own country of Germany, and instead of embarking on a campaign of resistance, revenge, and liberation from their German Christian tormentors, the Jews chose a weak, vulnerable and unsuspecting victim to mete out their revenge on. They embarked on a gigantic campaign of Jewish terrorism to drive the native Palestinians out of their lands.

How can anyone with a speck of decency reject Palestinian resistance against Israel as some sort of wanton violence? Palestinian resistance against their European Jewish tormentors may have taken various forms over the decades - secular, communist, left-wing, anarchist, Islamist, Arab nationalist... - the label doesn't matter. The fundamental remains unchanged: Palestine was raped by Europeans who incidentally happened to be Jews. The fact that those European invaders and settlers were Jews is secondary to the problem. Palestinians are not fighting Jews per se, as much as they are fighting European rapists, mass murderers, and colonial settlers. 

Nothing would have changed in the Palestine-Israel conflict if the foreign invaders and land-grabbers back in the 1920s were Japanese or Mozambicans or Chinese. The fundamental is simple: There was a millennial nation of Palestine trying to come out from under 400 years of Turkish Ottoman occupation. The international community tasked the English crooks with helping the Palestinians establish their national institutions. Just like France was tasked with helping the Lebanese next door establish their national institutions. While in Lebanon the French assisted the Lebanese and the nascent state of Lebanon to become reality, the English criminals betrayed their own mission by dumping millions of illegal European Jewish migrants to enter Palestine, rape and plunder it, drive its indigenous Palestinians out of their ancestral lands, and subverted the birth of a modern Palestinian State. 

Instead, the English crooks, in collusion with the other racist Europeans, got rid of their own Jewish citizens by shipping them to Palestine where they created the artifical state of Israel to serve as a forward colonial base for European imperialism coveting the oil fields of Arabia next door. Jews from Europe, north Africa, Iran, and the Arab Middle East were essentially pushed, bribed or threatened to move to Palestine to tilt the Jewish headcount against the native Palestinian headcount in order to justify stealing the land of Palestine from its indigenous people. These Jews were from different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, with different languages and customs. This random mélange of various peoples, united only by the flimsy and barbarian criterion of religion, could not even speak a common language, so the Zionists resurrected the otherwise dead language of Hebrew to become their common language, which they can't even speak properly. Modern Hebrew is a corruption of the original Hebrew language.  

Some years ago, I took Hebrew language classes in a synagogue in the US city where I live. The teacher was an Israeli woman whose father had emigrated to Palestine from Yemen. I was the only non-Jew in a class of about 25 adult learners, and since I spoke Arabic natively, my pronunciation of Hebrew was the original pronunciation of real authentic Hebrew, and not the corrupted perverted "Europeanized" Hebrew spoken by Israelis. My teacher would tell the class that I spoke Hebrew like her father. What she didn't say was that Israelis, being in their majority from central and eastern europe, spoke Hebrew with the same Slavic European-accented distorted pronunciation. 

For example, the sound represented by the Hebrew alphabet letter ayin ע is not pronounced correctly by Israelis in modern Hebrew. Instead of being pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative like its authentic cognate sound in Arabic ع , it is reduced in Israeli Modern Hebrew to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to the inability of Europeans to make that sound. 

Same thing with the sound of the Hebrew letter ḥēt ח. Instead of its authentic sound like Arabic ḥāʾ ح, which is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, European Israelis pronounce it as (Kh), a voiceless velar fricative. Whenever I hear the fake pronunciation by Israelis of "Khamas" instead of Hamas, or "Khezbollah" instead of Hezbollah, I am reminded of how artificial is the link claimed by the new European converts to judaism (modern Israelis) with the ancient original Hebrews of historic Palestine. If Israeli Jews were authentic Jews, they would have been able to pronounce these and other sounds correctly, instead of corrupting them as any other European would.

US State Dept. Diplomat: Biden's Gaza Policy on Wrong Side of History

US diplomat who quit over Biden administration’s Gaza policy speaks out
Jennifer Hansler, CNN
Fri, May 3, 2024


US State Department Hala Rharrit never expected that she would choose to leave her career as a US diplomat.

She had spent her “entire adult life” at the State Department having joined the foreign service in 2006, raising her hand for one of the toughest postings — Yemen — for her first assignment and going on to serve in places like Hong Kong, Qatar and South Africa. About a year and a half ago, after mostly behind-the-scenes roles, Rharrit became an Arab language spokesperson for the State Department.

“I had full intentions of continuing on in my career until I reached senior levels. I never had the intention of resigning,” she told CNN.

But the US government’s policy on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza “unfortunately really, really changed that,” she said.

Rharrit is the first-known career US diplomat to resign over the administration’s position on the war, which has lasted more than six months and taken the lives of more than 34,000 people in the coastal enclave, according to Palestinian authorities. Two other State Department officials — Josh Paul and Annelle Sheline — have also resigned in protest of the US’ policy, which has sharply divided the domestic population inside the United States, as seen in the major campus protests, and has sparked outcry globally.

Rharrit told CNN that she and her colleagues were “horrified” by the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, which triggered the war in Gaza.

“Everyone was sort of bracing themselves, ‘Oh, my goodness, what’s going to happen next?’” Rharrit recounted. She said they “knew obviously there was going to be a forceful reaction, but I don’t think anyone predicted the outcome would be 34,000 killed, famine conditions.”

Rharrit told CNN there wasn’t one particular incident that prompted her to resign, but rather the cumulative build-up of events throughout the war — and the growing sense of that her warnings about “destabilizing” policy were going unheeded.

“I’m fundamentally concerned that we’re on the wrong side of history and we are hurting our interests,” she said, referring to the Biden administration’s strong backing for Israel in the war with Hamas.

Rharrit also pointed to a “double standard” in US policy around the effects of the war, including the humanitarian crisis and the deaths of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

“As the United States we have to stand on our principles. We cannot make exceptions. Our allies and our adversaries are watching and it is hurting us as a nation,” Rharrit explained. “It was just one devastating frustration after another. I just kept on hoping until finally I was just like, I think I need to start planning. I don’t think things are going to get any better.”

As a spokesperson, Rharrit was tasked with presenting the US policy on the war to an Arabic-speaking audience, but from the outset, she said, the talking points were sharply distant from the images that audience was seeing on a daily basis, she explained.

Those talking points “focused towards a domestic US audience,” she said, and she warned the State Department that they would spark backlash and “be seen as dehumanizing to Palestinians.”

“That’s indeed what we saw. Through polls, we saw just growing anti-Americanism, our favorability plummet across the entire region, in countries where we had great relations,” Rharrit said.

Divided views within the department

Rharrit said some at the State Department encouraged her to continue to share her feedback and told her it was being relayed “to the highest levels of our policymakers.” However, she said others “silenced” and “sidelined” her.

“I was told ‘you’re refusing to do your job,’” she said.

Within the Department, although she said “a lot” of people did share her views, “it was very evident people were very uncomfortable talking about Gaza.”

“People were very uncomfortable providing critical feedback,” she said.

“The notion that we are complicit in the killings of those civilians is a very difficult and devastating thing for a diplomat to have to admit to themselves,” she explained. “And what do you do with that information if you’re not the one that can change the policy?”

And though the administration has said Israel needs to do more to protect civilians and let humanitarian aid through, the US has continued to supply weapons to Israel despite a growing backlash, even from top US officials, over the civilian toll of the war. There are divisions within the State Department about whether to certify as “credible and reliable” Israel’s assurances that it is using US weapons in compliance with international law.

Rharrit noted that “people are concerned about their careers too. So they’re — they want to affirm, ‘Okay, you know, I’m going to do my job, I’m going to execute, I’m going to deliver,’ and people are scared.”

Since the news of her resignation, “so many colleagues then came up to me and said, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve been feeling the exact same way as you. We just have not been able to say it.’”

The State Department would not comment specifically on Rharrit’s case, citing personnel matters. However, deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel noted there are channels where “our workforce can share their points of view when they disagree with a certain policy or a certain action that the US government is taking.”

“You’ve heard us talk about the dissent channel; that option, that channel continues to be in place,” he said at a press briefing last week. “The secretary reads every single one of those dissent channel cables and dissenting viewpoints from across the administration. We continue to welcome them, and we think that it helps lead to stronger, more robust policy making. And the secretary wants to hear differing points of views. He believes it makes him a better, stronger leader of this department, and a better and stronger policy maker.”

The Backward State of Missi-Pippi Remains a Bastion of White Racism

Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia Praises Racist Students who made monkey gestures at African-American woman protesting Israeli barbarity

In a photo taken from a video of the confrontation, white hecklers shout at a black pro-Palestinian protester at the University of Missi-pippi in Oxford, Miss. In a video shot by a student journalist, one white heckler is seen making monkey gestures and noises at a Black woman who was supporting Palestine against racist Israel. 

Pro-Palestine demonstrations at the University of Missipippi turned ugly this week when one white counter-protester appeared to make monkey noises and gestures at a black student. The neanderthal Republican Rep. Mike Collins from Georgia said on X, “Ole Miss taking care of business,” with a link to the video showing the racist jeers. The taunting brought sharp criticism on and off campus. “Ole Miss” is a nickname for the backward racist state of Missi-Pippi that is used by the seditious former white slave owners who were defeated like cockroaches in the American civil war of the 1860s.

“Students were calling for an end to genocide. They were met with racism,” James M. Thomas, a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi, wrote Friday on X.

The Rev. Cornell William Brooks, a former president and CEO of the NAACP and professor at Harvard University, commented on X that a white man mocking a black woman supporting a Free Palestine as a monkey “is performative racism”. It surely shows that white supremacists of the primitive American south are the allies of the Jewish supremacists carrying out the genocide in Palestine. In the US, African Americans are demeaned by white christians, while in Palestine, the native Palestinians are demeaned by foreign white jews. A brotherhood of racism between Zionism and the Ku Klux Klan joined at the hip.

The student newspaper, The Daily Missi-pippian, reported about fifty “UMiss for Palestine” protesters on the Oxford campus were in a grassy area near the main library, blocked off by barriers erected by campus security. They chanted “Free, free Palestine," and carried Palestinian flags and signs with slogans including, “Stop the Genocide" and “U.S. bombs take Palestine lives.” After the Black woman protesting the war had a heated exchange of words with several of the white racist hecklers, one of the men made the monkey gestures and noises at her.

University of Missi-Pippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce said the school is committed to people expressing their views. He said some statements made on campus Thursday were “offensive and unacceptable."

The Republican Governor of the backward state of Missi-pippi, Tate Reeves reposted a video on X that showed counter-protesters on the campus singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He appeared to endorse the white students’ racist jeers by posting, “warms my heart”.

Oxford, Missi-Pippi, is famous for its opposition to the Civil Rights movement and an end to segregation. No wonder it backs the segregationist Apartheid white Jewish colony in Palestine known as "Israel".  In September 1962, James Meredith became the first African American admitted to the University of Missi-Pippi in a milestone of the civil rights movement. But his admission triggered a riot spurred by a mob of 3,000 whites from across the South and officially stoked by the state's segregationist authorities. Apparently things haven't changed a bit among the unevolved inbred Appalachian moonshining retard white primates of the state of Missi-Pippi.

 

“Outside Agitators” is NYPD’s Zionist-instructed Lie to Discredit Student Protests

Just like every other authoritarian government wanting to diminish and discredit legitimate protests, New York City officials are blaming “outside agitators” for much of the student movement at Columbia University. In so doing, city officials send the message that the protests are not homegrown, but imported from the outside.

By attributing the protests to persons not affiliated with the university (students, professors, staff), city authorities score several objectives:

- 👉Delegitimize the protest movement. In plain terms, the Mayor and NYPD infantilize the students, professors and staff of the university by implying that they are incapable of acting on their own: Our students are not smart enough to conduct the protests by themselves.

- 👉Diminish the importance of the protest movement. Our students and professors would never go so far as demand freedom for Palestine from the claws of Zionist Israel.

- 👉 Justify the use of violence by NYPD. The Police seem to be saying, “our violent action is aimed at the ‘outside agitators’, not at the students.

New York mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officials are blaming “radicalization” by “outside agitators” for the Columbia University protests that resulted in more than 100 arrests on Tuesday night.

“After speaking with [Columbia] throughout the week, at their request and their acknowledgement that outside agitators were on their grounds... we went in and conducted an operation,” Mr. Adams said, at a press briefing on Wednesday.

Hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear stormed Columbia’s campus overnight after protesters occupied Hamilton Hall 24 hours earlier. Police used drones for surveillance and then a “SWAT ramp” was attached to the roof of a truck for officers enter the barricaded building and clear protesters. Some 109 people were arrested. In total, 282 protesters were arrested at New York schools on Tuesday as violence flared at campus protests across the country. However official explanations given by New York officials on Wednesday were swiftly called into question by Columbia professors and reporters.

At a Wednesday (May 1) press briefing, journalists pushed city officials for more details on the “agitators” asking if they had been identified and how many were involved in the Columbia protests. Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence & counterterrorism, said this was not a concern but that authorities are instead focused on “radicalization”. Mr.. Adams acknowledged that the “outside agitator” terminology was used during the 1960s Civil Rights movement to delegitimize protesters.

Later on Wednesday, Columbia faculty members rejected claims from Mr.. Adams and the police that the protests were led by “outside agitators.” “When I was a student, back in the 60s, we were told we were led by a bunch of outside agitators by politicians nobody remembers the name of today,” said Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi at a press conference on campus.

He said that Columbia’s school administrators will “go down in infamy” for their actions against protesters and calling in the NYPD to remove them. Police officials also described makeshift weapons used by the “agitators.” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard appeared on MSNBC morning show, Morning Joe, on Wednesday with a bike chain that he said protesters used to barricade Hamilton Hall.

“This is not what students bring to school,” Commissioner Sheppard said. “This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities.” However, the same bike chain is sold by Columbia’s public safety office to students.

The NYPD also faced questions over press access during clearing of protests. On Wednesday, Mr.. Adams said the national press was able to report from the scene. “National independent journalists acknowledged what the police department did yesterday and they were on the ground to see it,” he said. But reporters said that the NYPD prevented media from accessing the campus and closed off entire city blocks around the university on Tuesday.

Later, the NYPD confined at least a dozen reporters and legal observers for nearly an hour with a group of protesters, refusing to allow them to leave a cordoned-off area as they loaded arrested students on to buses.

For weeks, Gaza protests have roiled college campuses across the US as demonstrators have demanded that schools divest from Israel in light of the heavy bombings in the territory that followed the Hamas militant group’s 7 October attack.

CNN anchor Erin Burnett pressed New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) on his claims of “outside agitators” at the recent pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

“Do you have any ability at this point to tell us how many of those were ‘outside agitators’ and how many of them were students at Columbia University?” Burnett said on her CNN show Wednesday.

Adams responded that there was “clear evidence of training that was conducted by an outside agitator, that was not a student, did not belong on the campus.”

“In addition to that, we saw people participating and allowing people access to Hamilton Hall,” Adams continued, referring to the building on Columbia’s campus that was taken over by protesters Tuesday morning.

Adams then said he “received a letter from the school” and that in that letter, the school claimed that there were “outside individuals who were on the grounds, [participating in] this activity.”

Burnett then questioned if there would be a “breakdown” from Adams’s office or the New York City Police Department on how many of the people arrested Tuesday night were actually Columbia students.

“Here’s what we can do, we’re allowed to do,” Adams said. “We’re going to give the complete list of those who are arrested and turn it over to the school, and the school will make the determination. We’re not going to release student’s name, but the school can make the determination of giving you a breakdown … of the difference between students and nonstudents. They would have that authorization to do so.” Violence erupted at Columbia the previous night, as NYPD cracked down on pro-Palestinian protesters at the school. The New York mayor said Tuesday at a press conference that the protests at Columbia were “co-opted by professional outside agitators”

Adams on Wednesday said “outside agitators” are influencing college protests; these “agitators are not affiliated with the university” and are known to the department, according to NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner.

“There are a number of different individuals who we know from over the years associated with protests, not just in our city but in other cities as well, who are linked to and who see doing training around the change of tactics,” Weiner said.

Adams said these alleged professionals are impacting the students. “Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children,” Adams said. “And I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of New York.”

Student organizers said the takeover was inspired by previous campus anti-war movements after negotiations over the University’s financial ties to Israel fell through, according to students with Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

“This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968, 1985, and 1996, which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today,” wrote the organizers in a statement to Instagram.

The NYPD and University have faced criticism for their response to student protests, which students and faculty have called brutal and “heavy-handed.” “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the heavy-handed, militaristic response to student activism that we are seeing across the country,” wrote representatives of the American Association of University Professors in a statement.

“At this critical moment, too many cowardly university leaders are responding to largely peaceful, outdoor protests by inviting law enforcement in riot gear to campus and condoning violent arrests.”

In His Own Words: Netanyahu derailed the Oslo Accords by Tricking America

Netanyahu brags about derailing Oslo accords with political trickery

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily"

As resistance to American military support for Israel grows, a 2001 hidden-camera video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows him speaking candidly about aggressive military action against Palestinians.

The video shows Netanyahu bragging "of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery."

The almost six-minute segment stems from a video filmed in 2001, following Netanyahu's first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999.  The film was shot, apparently without Netanyahu's knowledge, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada, a period of increased violence between Palestinians and Israelis from 2000 to 2005 following the failure of peace negotiations and the reoccupation of Palestinian lands by Israeli troops.

In the video, Netanyahu made a series of unguarded admissions about his first term as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

The Oslo Accords provided a framework for negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

One of the major hurdles in that process, which began in 1993, concerned Israel's military occupation of Hebron — a significant West Bank city with an aggressive and violent Jewish settlement. Under Netanyahu's predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, Israel agreed in 1995 to remove Israeli troops from Hebron in phases subject to certain terms and conditions.

When Netanyahu took power in 1996, he told then-U.S. President Bill Clinton that he would honor the Hebron agreement reached under the previous administration. In the video, Netanyahu said that the correct policy toward Palestinians should be to hit them "hard" with blows "that are so painful the price will be too heavy to be borne," thus rendering them more amenable to Israeli demands. In the video, one of Netanyahu's hosts asked whether the former prime minister would fear the response from America with such a move. Netanyahu shrugged off the notion that America would do anything but support Israel, stating that America is something that "can easily be moved."

To make this point forcefully, Netanyahu continued by bragging about having manipulated Clinton and used deceptive tactics to intentionally destroy the Oslo peace process.

Netanyahu … bragged how he undercut the peace process when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo Accords]," he said. "I said I would, but … I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders”.

Netanyahu raised this anecdote and explained to those gathered around him that "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily".

Seated on a sofa in the house, Netanyahu tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as "easily moved to the right direction" and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel "absurd". He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel's harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats. In parallel, Netanyahu was courting Hamas in Gaza by allowing financial and military assistance to flow to it from Qatar to drive a wedge between the West Bank's Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza.

The broader significance of the video is that it showed Netanyahu openly stating that he could manipulate American foreign policy and that he was willing to negotiate in bad faith.