Vile and Psychotic Republican Trump Lackeys andd Footmen

Bill Barr once said Trump shouldn’t be near Oval Office. Now he says he will vote for him in 2024

This is how deranged the Republican Party has become, as it contemplates its own demise because of such contradictory and unprincipled postures. As it desperately seeks to overcome its tragic decomposition from a Grand Old Party to a clan of incompetent and fumbling tribes with antiquated ideas, the Republican Party is swallowing its own spit in large doses.

When I hear an otherwise respectable-looking US official say that he will vote for the same maniacal mentally-ill idiot Trump he often deemed unfit for office, I imagine some Afghan Taliban tribal chief in the wilderness of Afghanistan swearing allegiance like a minion to the big bearded and turbaned silverback in his guilded palace.


Getty Images

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who previously said that Donald Trump shouldn’t be near the Oval Office, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday that he would vote for the former president over President Joe Biden in the 2024 election.

“I think that Biden is unfit for office,” Barr said on “The Source” in a wide-ranging interview. “I think Trump would do less damage than Biden, and I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy – I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Collins pressed Barr – who has been highly critical of his former boss – “Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen. … You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

Barr began, “Look, the 88 criminal counts, a lot of those are-”

“Even if 10 of them are accurate?” Collins interjected.

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr countered. “I’m supporting the Republican ticket.”

Pressed further on whether he would vote for Trump specifically, Barr said, “Between Biden and Trump, I will vote for Trump because I believe he will do less damage over the four years.”

Barr went on to describe the difference between both parties in stark terms, insisting that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left.”

“I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration,” he said.

Barr was more critical of Trump after he was indicted in the federal election subversion case last year. Speaking to Collins in August, the former attorney general described Trump’s alleged actions as detailed in the indictment as “nauseating” and “despicable,” adding that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Asked by Collins on Friday whether the Biden administration’s actions have been worse than his former boss’ attempts to disrupt the transfer of power following the 2020 election, Barr downplayed Trump’s efforts, responding, “Did he succeed?”

“I’m very troubled by it and that’s why it’s not an easy decision, but I think when you have a Hobson’s choice, you have to pick the lesser of two evils,” he continued.

“The fact of the matter is, as I said all along, I agreed with Trump’s policies and despite the media, the left-wing media’s effort to portray it as a lawless administration, it wasn’t. His policies were sound and we had victories in courts and we defended them,” he added.

Barr’s appearance on “The Source” came a day after the Supreme Court heard arguments in the election subversion case on whether presidents should not have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for their actions while in office. Trump maintains that the conduct he has been charged over was part of his official duties as president and that he is shielded from criminal liability.

Barr told Collins that he would’ve liked to see the case tried before the election and that he disagreed with Trump’s claims of sweeping immunity but noted “there has to be some precision as to what exact where exactly he crossed the line.”

“That’s why I feel it’s going to have to go back to the district court,” Barr said. “Was this the president seeing that the laws were faithfully executed or was this a candidate trying to bully and press a state into changing its vote when he knew the vote had been against him?”

Collins pressed Barr, “You were there, which one do you believe it is?”

“I’d have to see all the evidence and see the case litigated,” Barr said, avoiding a direct answer.

“I wasn’t happy with the way he behaved after the election, but whether it was a crime is a different issue,” Barr said.

CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.

Senator Bernie Sanders: Netanyahu is Guilty of Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine

 

 

Sanders says there’s not ‘any doubt’ Netanyahu is perpetrating ‘ethnic cleansing’

Lauren Sforza
Sun, April 28, 2024



Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again on Sunday, saying that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “ethnic cleansing.”

Sanders reiterated his familiar call on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday to hold Netanyahu responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza, pointing to the staggering death toll and the displacement of Palestinians in the region. He was asked to respond to the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests that have broken out on college campuses across the country and to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) remarks last week when visiting Columbia University.

“What I think the essential point that Ilhan made is that we do not want to see antisemitism in this country. And I think the word ‘genocide’ is something that is being determined by the International Court of Justice,” he said.

“But just as what I will say: I don’t think there’s any doubt that what Netanyahu is doing now — displacing 80 percent of the population in Gaza — is ethnic cleansing. That’s what it is. Pushing out huge numbers of people,” he added.

Omar visited Columbia’s campus last week, where the national spotlight has focused on the hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered there. CNN played a clip of her comments Sunday on the ongoing protests on “State of the Union.”

“I think it is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe and that we should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide,” she said.

Sanders has repeatedly criticized Netanyahu for the ongoing war in Gaza and has opposed more U.S. funding to Israel. He also reiterated his calls for an end to U.S. funding to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“And now we’re looking at the possibility of an attack on Rafah, where people have gone to as a so-called safety zone. So, what’s going on there, again, to my mind, is outrageous. And as you’ve indicated, I strongly oppose U.S. funding for Netanyahu’s war machine,” he added.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) let loose a scathing statement this week in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s accusation that protests at United States universities against Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza are “antisemitic.”

“Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people", Sanders said in a video posted to X on Thursday. Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 25, 2024

The senator implored the prime minister to “not insult the intelligence of the American people” in an attempt to “distract” them from Israel’s “immoral and illegal war policies.”

Israel’s offensive on Gaza, ...  has now left an estimated 34,000 Palestinians dead. UN Women, the United Nations organization for gender equality, reported in February that 70% of Palestinians killed at that time were women and children.

The senator said it “is not antisemitic” to note that Israel’s military operation has left more than half the population of Gaza homeless, “obliterated” the Palestinian territory’s water and electric infrastructure and “annihilated” its health care system.

Sanders, who is Jewish, concluded, “It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.”

The video and an accompanying written statement came the day after Netanyahu called the recent upswell of antiwar protests at American college campuses “horrific,” characterizing them as “antisemitic mobs.” The student protesters are broadly calling for the U.S. to stop sending military aid to Israel and for educational institutions to divest financially from Israel.

“At universities across the nation, our movement is united in valuing every human life,” said a statement from one such group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, per ABC News.

 

State Department Says Israel is Violating International Law

Some in State Department don’t believe Israel is using US weapons in accordance with international law, source says

Jennifer Hansler and Jack Forrest, CNN

Mon, April 29, 2024

The State Department is divided over whether Israel is using American-provided weapons in accordance with international law ahead of a fast-approaching deadline next week for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make a determination to Congress.

There is not unanimity about whether to accept Israel’s assurances about this as “credible and reliable,” a department official said. Israel was required to make those assurances to the US under a national security memorandum issued by President Joe Biden in February.

The memorandum requires all countries receiving US weapons to make assurances that they are using them “in a manner consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

Under that memorandum, Blinken must tell Congress by May 8 whether he has certified the assurances to be credible and reliable.

Human rights groups have accused Israel of committing war crimes and abuses during the war in Gaza. Several hundred officials from Western countries, including some from the US, have previously raised concerns that their governments may be complicit in war crimes in their support of Israel’s fight against Hamas.

The State Department official Sunday did not give further details about which parts of the department are in favor of accepting Israel’s assurances, which are in favor of rejecting them, and which took no position.

Reuters reported Sunday that four bureaus – Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; Population, Refugees and Migration; Global Criminal Justice; and International Organization Affairs – raised “serious concern over non-compliance” with international humanitarian law during the war.

“We don’t comment on leaked documents, especially those purporting to contain classified information,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.

“On complex issues, the Secretary often hears a diverse range of views from within the Department, and he takes all of those views into consideration,” he said. “In this instance, the Department received the assurances that were required by the National Security Memorandum, and we are now preparing a report to Congress.”

The concerns come after Biden signed into law an aid package that includes $26 billion for Israel. That funding includes $4.4 billion to replenish defense items and services provided to Israel and $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems and other items through the Foreign Military Financing Program.

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, which killed over 1,200 Israelis, the US has made more than 100 foreign military sales to Israel. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Progressives are growing increasingly frustrated with Biden’s support for Israel, as protests over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza spread across the US, most notably on college campuses, where protesters have decried the stance of “Genocide Joe.” But the president on Sunday again reaffirmed his “ironclad” commitment to Israel in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The White House could slow military provisions, curtail monetary assistance, or drastically ratchet up the public pressure on Netanyahu if the US concludes Israel is impeding aid to Gaza and not adhering to human rights laws.

Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s war, though, has at times flagged. Following the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers this month, the president for the first time threatened Netanyahu, telling him in a call that the US could be forced to make changes to free-flowing support if Israel did not make immediate moves to allow more humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

Last week, the State Department’s annual report on human rights raised sharp concerns about war crimes reported in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. The report referred to actions taken by Hamas on October 7 and also included “reports of systemic torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment of Palestinian detainees in prison facilities after October 7” and the forced disappearance of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.

While the report does not represent the US government’s own conclusions, Blinken said last week that the State Department was looking at the incidents.

“It’s important that we take the time to do our best to get the facts, to get the information, to do the analysis,” he said. “It’s very challenging to do this in real time.”

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that to his knowledge, “we don’t have any evidence of genocide being created” by Israel during its war in Gaza.

Blinken has previously called charges of genocide against Israel “meritless.”

CNN’s Michael Conte, Kayla Tausche and MJ Lee contributed to this report.

 

Israel is Facing the Abyss

There again is hope that a ceasefire could be brokered with Hamas and the remaining 139 hostages returned. Talks have been deadlocked for months over Hamas’s demand that any deal lead to an end to the conflict, and Israel’s refusal to consider anything but “total victory”.

But late on Saturday night,  it was reported that a new Israeli proposal, brokered by Egypt, includes a willingness to discuss the “restoration of sustainable calm” in Gaza after an initial release of some 20-30 hostages. Since everything in diplomatic speak hinges on using one word or another, "sustainable calm" does not mean "premanent ceasefire". Netanyhau is refusing to end the conflict and wants to maintain the pressure, even if his intransigence leads to the death of the Israeli prisoners in Hamas's hands. 

No one really knows how many Israeli prisoners are still alive: but assuming that the Israeli terrorist organization doesn't lie (a very weak assumption, but....), they say they killed 12,000 Hamas terrorists as of the end of February, which is about half the total number of troops Hamas is estimated to have. If this is indeed the case, and assuming the Israeli captives are always closely attached to the Hamas combatants, one would expect that half the Israeli prisoners would have died in Israel's own shelling of Gaza, i.e. somewhere near 65 are the ones still alive. This explains the dwindling margin of negotiations that Hamas has: It doesn't have enough Israeli prisoners left to trade. In fact, some Israelis are saying that Netanyahu is willing to lose all his captives provided he goes into Rafah. In other words, it seems that Netanyahu and Hamas indirectly agree to continue the war, which is why the negotiations have been stalled for several weeks now. A hypothetical victory by Israel against Hamas, which is a far-fetched notion, will have to occur at the expense of the prisoners' lives.

It was previously reported that the number of prisoners Israel is asking Hamas to release in the initial phase of a ceasefire has also been reduced, which proves the point made above. Yet it is the proposal for an extended peace that is likely to make or break the new proposal, which the Hamas leadership is now considering and is expected to respond to in the next few days, although Hamas knows it is at the end of its rope and the opportunities offered by its war against Israel on October 7 will no longer be available in the foreseeable future.

“The proposal … includes a willingness to discuss the establishment of a sustainable ceasefire as part of the implementation of the second phase of the deal, which would take place after the release of hostages on humanitarian grounds,” reported the Axios news site on Sunday, quoting Israeli officials. But Hamas can read between the lines: It wants a permanent ceasefire and a return to the status quo ante, albeit it knows it will have to compromise on sharing power with the Palestinian Authority or with international troops on the ground and so on.

The reported shift in the Israeli position sparked anger from radical terrrorist circles close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night who, playing with words, said Israel’s war aims remained unchanged - something the new formulation allows for. Nevertheless the new deal - if accepted by Hamas - could spark a political crisis in Israel. The extreme Jewish terrorist parties that Netanyahu’s finely balanced coalition relies on have long said they will pull out if he stops the war before Hamas is wholly defeated.

These parties, however, represent only a handful of seats and the opposition Yesh Atid party has said it will step in and support the government if it can secure a deal which sees the return of the missing 139 hostages.

The new offer comes at the end of a week in which Israel has been talking up preparations for a military push into Rafah in the south of Gaza where Hamas’s last four battalions are thought to be dug in. The threat of an Israeli invasion of Rafah remains real and may pressure Hamas to engage constructively with the new deal, say analysts.

Israel is also feeling the heat from the US and other allies who have been ratcheting up the pressure ever since intervening decisively to protect Israel from the Iranian missile barrage two weeks ago.

The growing pressure on Netanyahu's Israel stems from several issues: 

1-Israel's vulnerability could be exploited by a new wave of Iranian missiles, and all it takes is one missile to hit a target for the damage to be done to Israel's invincibility.

2-On the nothern border, Hezbollah presents a far bigger threat than Hamas does. 

3-Israel's image internationally has been severly tarnished.

4-Israel’s dependence on western military aid represents an element of structural weakness, again striking at the very heart of the image of Israel as a country that can defend itself.

5-The damage done to US-Israel relations against the background of Israel's violation of international law is huge; Never before has this issue been so openly discussed and contemplated. 

6-Talk of sanctions on Israel for genocide and action by the International Criminal Court in the Hague have been growing steadily louder. 

7-American public opinion has turned against Israel and wants a definitive solution to the Palestinian statehood question. 

8-Finally, even the UK, the midwife of the barbaric Jewish colony in Palestine, is demanding accountability; It wants to inspect Israeli prisons in which it is detaining Hamas suspects from Gaza.

In sum, Israel is facing enormous pressures it never had to deal with before, and it must make many critical decisions. “...every decision the Israeli government makes will have far-reaching consequences for its strategic situation for many years to come,” tweeted Shay Har-Zvi, a Senior fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy and a former official in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. He added that a deal may pave the way for the advancement of the wider US peace plan for the region, including the rebuilding of Gaza and formation of a “coalition against Iran”.

“On the other hand, another failure could lead to a wide multi-arena escalation,” he said. Although there is cause for hope, the chances of success remain slim based on recent performance. “Every time we get close to a deal… there is sabotage taking place… from both sides,” said a top Qatari official in an interview with the newspaper Haaretz on Saturday.

 

Netanyahu Orders his US Butlers to Violently Supress pro-Palestine Student Protests

Netanyahu is anxious and terrified. Not only is his political fate sealed by his failure at  preventing the Hamas operation against his Jewish colony on the Mediterranean, but he has single-handedly destroyed any sympathy that Israel had painstakingly nurtured around the world since the abomminable rape-creation of Israel over the ashes of historic Palestine. That sympathy was in large part extracted with loads of propaganda, lies, guilt-infliction, misinformation, and disinformation to artificially elevate the so-called Jewish people to the status of an exclusive club of infallible superior settler-victims while brutally dehumanizing the colonized native indigenous Palestinian population trying to resist and defend its stolen homeland.

Netanyahu has been plagued by protests against him inside his own colony long before the Hamas operation of last October. The wanted criminal fugitive is hiding behind his shield as a Prime Minister who has failed to contain domestic protests against him, yet he is so arrogant when it comes to the US that he his instructing his American administration poodle to use violence to quell the "horrific" student protests on university campuses, like he is doing in Gaza. In his own mind, there is nothing horrific about his own genocide and murder of 34,000 innocent civilian Palestinians.

This wanted criminal is running away from justice by prolonging his failed war on the Palestinians, in the hope that his moronic puppet Donald Dumb walks back into the White Outhouse next November. And he finds it all too natural to interfere in American domestic affairs because his Zionist thugs do actually OWN the United States as if it were a kennel for inbred American mongrels.

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The English Midwife of the monster colony of Israel is expressing its regrets at being an accomplice to the Zionists' rape of Palestine.

Israeli Crime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday "more has to be done" to stop pro-Palestinian protests that have spread across U.S. campuses in recent weeks. 

"What's happening in America's college campuses is horrific," he said in a recorded statement, accusing "antisemitic mobs" of taking over leading universities.

"It's unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally," he said. "The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done."

Protests over Israel's actions in Gaza have intensified across U.S. campuses in recent weeks with the Gaza war now in its seventh month. Pro-Palestinian protesters have called for a ceasefire and for their universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel. Dozens of students have been doxxed, suspended by the university and arrested by police.

While a handful of American Zionist students are trying to undermine and tarnish the protests by pretending that the latter have created a hostile environment, many decent Jewish students, professors and administrators, as well as outside Jewish organizations not affiliated with the universities, are an integral part of the protest movement and continue to play a vocal role in the protests, like Jewish Voice for Peace.

A Jew is not necessarily a Zionist, just as a Palestinian is not necessarily a terrorist

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, of whom 70% are women and children, in its ongoing assault on the blockaded Gaza Strip, with many more thousands remaining buried under the rubble. The objective of Israel is to finalize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was begun in 1948

The "Palestinian Question" has become for the Zionists just like the "Jewish Question" was for the Germans: Israel must complete its annihilation of the Palestinian people whose  millennial existence in Palestine is an obstacle to its becoming a "pure" Jewish-only country. After all, the Zionists were bred and steeped in the German culture: They share with the Germans many attributes: militarism, hatred of everyone else, racism, deep psychological and existential problems, megalomania, and a cold-blooded indifference to human suffering (as long as it is not their own suffering).

Desperate Zionists Unable to Adapt to the Narrative Revolution

With the blind support that Israel and Zionists have benefited from for the past several decades, primarily using their monopoly over the information, the younger generation of Americans has finally discovered the truth and the facts about Israel's barbaric colonial creation as an outpost for the Anglo-Saxon colonizers and global abusers. This generation has the Internet and social media to fact-check all the lies that European and American Zionists have been disseminating to justify their extermination of the indigenous Palestinian people and attempted obliteration of the Palestinian national identity.

 Jonathan Greenblatt

The German Zio-Nazi führer of ADL who is running out of lies and has no better argument in favor of Apartheid Israel than to use Nazi language and symbols to demonize Israel's victim: the entire Palestinian nation.

In their despair, Zionists are going to riddiculous extremes, like the Nazi-looking and Nazi-sounding Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which is no more than an extension of the ultra-racist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Greenblatt said that pro-Palestinian Freedom protesters, including the hundreds of Jewish students who have joined the protesters and saying "NOT IN OUR NAME", are Hamas proxies, antisemitic (so boring, it doesn't cling anymore) and a threat to Jewish students. Jewish students are a threat to Jewish students???? If so, then Mr. Greenblatt's problem is not with the Palestinians or the student protesters; his problem is that Israel is quickly sliding into a civil war between modern, secular, well-adjusted western European immigrant Jews on one hand, and the barbarian ultra-orthodox immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, Russia, Iran and north Africa on the other hand who appear to be turning the British-American colony in Palestine into a Jewish theocracy in a copy-paste of the Islamic theocracy in Iran. From Europe, the Jews have brought to Palestine the methods and practices of the Nazi German Reich from which they fled (brutality, militarism, racism, etc.), while those from Africa, Iran and the Arab world have brought with them practices inspired from radical Islamic monotheistism.

In other words, Greenblatt is demonizing the protests and insinuating that the protesters are terrorists and therefore should be lethally dealt with. He even compared the millennial Arab headdress, the Keffieyh, to the German Swastika. He should look more closely at his Star of David which bears uncanny resemblance with the German Swastika.

But his own ADL is a proxy of the ultra-religious barbaric Israeli government, which means Greenblatt is as guilty as the IDF terrorist organization in the ethnic cleansing and genocide unfolding in Palestine. Is this proper discourse for a responsible person? No, but Greenblatt is fuming at having lost the free-run he and his Zionist barbarians have had over the largely ignorant American population. The younger generation has finally understood what went on in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century: A mega-ethnic cleansing of native indigenous Palestinians to be replaced by hordes of Eastern European Jews (Tussia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia, etc.) willing to play the pawns in the British-American colonization scheme.

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CAIR Calls On MSNBC to Ban ADL Boss Over ‘Iranian Proxies’ Remark

Justin Baragona

Fri, April 26, 2024 at 2:11 AM GMT+3·3 min read

 The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for MSNBC to ban Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt from its airwaves over recent comments he made about college students protesting against the war in Gaza.

During an appearance last Friday on Morning Joe, Greenblatt railed against the pro-Palestinian protests raging at Columbia University and other college campuses, describing them as antisemitic and threatening to Jewish students. He also took a shot at the two main organizations behind the demonstrations—the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups like SJP and JVP,” he declared.

In a statement on Thursday, CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell claimed that Greenblatt was defaming the groups and urged the network to stop booking Greenblatt.

“Falsely claiming that Jewish and Palestinian student organizations are literal proxies of the Iranian government is a dangerous and defamatory slander that has no place on MSNBC or any other television network,” Mitchell stated.

“No civil rights leader would ever equate Jewish and Palestinian college students with Hezbollah, analogize the Nazi swastika to the Palestinian keffiyeh or question whether Hamas sympathizers were writing MSNBC scripts,” he added. “Mr. Greenblatt’s increasingly unhinged and outrageous comments must be condemned, and MSNBC should no longer give him a platform to peddle his hate speech.”

Responding to CAIR’s comments about Greenblatt, an ADL spokesperson told The Daily Beast: “Let’s be clear about SJP and JVP. In the days following the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, SJP explicitly endorsed the actions of Hamas and their armed attacks on Israeli civilians and JVP’s leadership stated multiple times that Israel was the “root cause” of the violence. This is not criticism of the war or Israel, this is glorifying terrorists and blaming the victim.”

CAIR claims that this is at least the third time that Greenblatt has made inflammatory remarks on MSNBC’s airwaves without being challenged by the network’s hosts.

Shortly after the October 7 attacks that sparked the war, Greenblatt appeared on Morning Joe and blasted the channel’s reporting on the conflict and wondered if the network’s scripts were written by Hamas sympathizers. (MSNBC featured three Muslim anchors during that weekend’s coverage of the attacks on Israel.)

In a separate interview later that day, Greenblatt explained to another network that he had been “literally watching the words scroll down on the camera” during his Morning Joe appearance and thought, “Who are the people in the back who think it is reasonable to describe this as quote, unquote, resistance, or to make these claims as if there is some moral equivalency?” He also insisted that he was “looking for journalism not activism.”

Earlier this month, dozens of Muslim and Arab civil rights groups—including CAIR—condemned the ADL after Greenblatt seemingly compared the Palestinian keffiyeh to a swastika, urging the organization to fire him.

“This pattern of behavior must end,” the joint statement read. “The ADL should terminate Mr. Greenblatt, apologize for its history of bad-faith attacks on various communities, and stop attempting to defame, silence and endanger those who express support for Palestinian human rights. Until then, it is no ally in the fight against hate.”

Greenblatt reacted to this condemnation by claiming his comments were “unsurprisingly being taken entirely out of context by CAIR, an organization that seems to specialize in fiction rather than fact.” Saying hate speech shouldn’t be “tolerated whether the person is wearing a Nazi armband or a keffiyeh,” Greenblatt added that he was “not comparing the garb” but rather “comparing the hate speech and how it shouldn’t be tolerated from anyone.”

MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This Generation is Standing up to Resurgent Dark Age of Fascist Conservatism

There is a fatal contradiction at the heart of Western societies as they emerged from World War II. On one hand, they began to dismantle their colonial oppression of other peoples and reaffirmed their beliefs in universal human rights, which they enshrined in their own constitutions and international covenants. Yet, their status as victors of the war granted them the power to make decisions that unfortunately did not match their signatures on these covenants and continued to do harm to the peoples and nations they enslaved for centuries. That contradiction is exploding in their faces as we write these lines.

The younger western generation feels that contradiction deep in its psyche: How can we live in the freest, wealthiest, healthiest, and most technologically advanced polities in history, while millions of people around the globe continue to suffer the ravages and consequences of colonialism. The West is rich simply because it pilfered the resources of the colonized south and east. Now that the south and the east are reclaiming their positions as free and equal nations to their former colonizers, the younger generations in the West grew up believing in real justice and human rights on the ground, and not merely as theoretical principles. They were taught to love their countries (patriotism), but without hating other countries (nationalism). With the long distance separating them from the events of the mid-20^th century, they apply the tenets they were taught without exceptions, unlike Joe Biden’s generation that says it believes in those principles, but with caveats, exceptions, and residual animus and racism.

Globalization has made this younger generation aware of human diversity in a positive sense. They make friends with people from every far corner of the planet and understand that their own patriotism rejects all the residual discrimination and racism of the older generation. Yes, the West represents for them the best outcome out of the troubled and bloody human history of their elders. But still, this makes them wonder: Why do we, whose parents and grandparents pilfered the world to create this paradise of ours, not try to finally bring some fairness to an international order maintained with the threat of violence by the nuclear bullies?

This is at the heart of the revolutionary urge that is emanating from the university campuses. Unlike their hate-mongering conservative predecessor generations, many young westerners have felt it their moral obligation to militate for human rights and justice for ALL nations and not for some, for the protection of the environment which their elders raped with greedy corporations, for applying the universal principles universally and not preferentially, and for the liberation of the last colonized people on earth: Palestine.

There is now a striking correlation between one's level of education and holding constructive forward-looking ideas, between being highly credentialled and rejecting the violence-prone inclinations of the older generation. I have spoken to many Jewish Americans of the younger generation and they do not understand the racist supremacist blindness of the Zionist movement whose success is clearly contingent on maintaining highly organized violence against the Palestinians. These young Jewish students are themselves the university campus militants protesting Israel’s continued rape of Palestine. For the Zionists, Israel has never been the sheltering homeland for Jews as they claim. It was designed by the British crooks to serve as a western colonial base in the heart of the Muslim world. Jews were never persecuted by the Muslim and Arab nations of which they were integral constituents during millennia. Jewish and Muslim traditions and customs are nearly identical; after all, the Bible and science agree that Hebrews and Arabs share a common Semitic ancestor; the Jews having originated in Ur in today’s Iraq and were bona fide Arab nomadic tribes before they ravaged ancient Palestine and ethnically cleanse the Canaanite ancestors of today’s Palestinians.

Remember the 700-year-long Andalusian paradise under Moorish Arab rule where Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony and tolerance? That harmony ended when Christian monarchs and the Church decided to force Muslims and Jews to convert or face the Inquisition or suffer expulsion. The persecution and hatred of Jews were staples of Western societies for centuries and millennia. Antisemitism is a Western construct. Jews were persecuted by none other than the very religious western Christian conservatives who today claim to want to defend them. If there was any persecution of Jews in Arab lands, it occurred at the hands of the Jewish Agency and other Zionist agencies that acted to terrorize Arab, Persian, north African and other Jews into emigrating to Israel, not out of love or kinship, but to increase the Jewish herd headcount in Palestine which in turn, they thought, would justify the creation of the fake state of Israel.

It can be easily argued that the West loves its Jews so much that, after slaughtering them wholesale, it gave the surviving ones someone’s else land where they shipped them off and got rid of them.

The virulence of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hatred on campuses across America is not new. Zionists spent much of the 20^th century demonizing Arabs and Palestinians for the sole objective of justifying the rape of Palestine. No truly civilized country would tolerate this, but the West lapped up Zionist propaganda and became the captive hostage of Israel in a disturbing Stockholm Syndrome relationship. Wearing the Keffiyeh is enough to trigger Zionists to shoot and kill the bearer of the headscarf. For the past century that Palestinians have been trying to salvage their country, the image that Zionist propaganda instilled in the West was they were terrorists, Islamists, Jew-haters, barbarians, rapists, etc. No surprise, this has been the standard operating procedure by Western colonials: portray the indigenous resistors to the colonial invader as unevolved, primitive and violent sub-humans who should be either converted=civilized, enslaved, or killed.

Today’s protests are even more liberating than those of 1968. They reject Right-wing conservatism as archaic and primitive and incompatible with genuine democracy. They refute the white supremacy and racism that are raising their ugly head to take us back to the 19^th century where everyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon male was treated as inferior.

Reputed historians, not paid Zionist charlatans, compare the protests to the 1968 worldwide protests that ushered individual freedoms as foundations for a rejuvenated West. America's defeat in Vietnam, followed by all the other American failures and defeats in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere are proof that no country, no matter how powerful, can impose its will by violence and wars. Israel is no different: The only way for it to survive is to remain in a state of constant warfare, which refutes the notion of a peaceful existence.

The past six months have exposed the West’s Right-wing elites for the phonies that they are: A movement obsessed with seeing disturbing revolutionary movements sprout everywhere. These conservative elites fear that the stranglehold they have had over western societies for decades is unraveling. To this end, the student protesters are labeled antisemitic, anarchists, Marxists, woke operatives…. All stale labels from long bygone eras. The conservative elites do not mind the genocide in Gaza, the rape, abuse and sexual assaults by Israeli soldiers and fanatic settlers against the indigenous Palestinian population, just as they don’t mind China’s brutality against the Uighurs and Tibet as long as there is money to be made with the Chinese dictatorship. To them, Palestinians, Tibetans, Uighurs and other downtrodden colonized peoples are subhuman animals, and the world should not bother with disturbing China’s barbarity or Israel’s savagery.

In 2024, a resurgent Right-wing Fascist ideology is the new religion whose heroes are the likes of Putin, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Trump, etc. These dictators are taking the world back to the edge of the abyss, just like their Fascist forefathers – Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc. - did in Europe and elsewhere. It was liberal America, liberal Europe, revolutionary Republican Spain, and others who put an end to the barbarity. Liberalism is under siege by would-be Fascist tyrants and dictators. Today’s student protests have lit a fire in the heart of every person who believes in fairness and justice. Their belief in our civilization is unshakable, but they want everyone on board, including Palestine, the last colonized country on earth. We won’t go back to double standards based on racism and supremacy. We cannot grant the barbarian neanderthal Right another run against our liberal institutions, including our universities. The West has no future if our youth are taught to submit to the notion that only through violence can the West impose its will.

"Asian-Handjob" Robert Krapt Pontificates on Hatred

Asian-Handjob Master and Patriots Owner Robert Krapt Ignores Zionist-driven "Palestine Hatred" in the 21st century, while nagging about 'Jew hatred' in Germany in the 1930s-1940s.

Mr. KRAPT: How can a Jewish student protesting for Palestine be a Jew hater?

New England Patriots owner Robert Krapt said Thursday that the campus protests launched nationwide in response to Israel’s campaign in Gaza are another parallel of the lead-up to the Holocaust.

Krapt, a longtime supporter of Columbia University's Jewish students (but no others), said that when he created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, in part as a response to the “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, he saw rising signs of extreme hatred.

In the current college protests, he said, he’s seeing further echoes of the forces that helped give rise to the Nazis.

“It starts like it did in the ’30s in Germany,” Krapt said. “Five years ago, I saw signs of hate developing here. I don’t want the 1940s to replicate here and unfortunately, I’m seeing signs of that and good people have to stand up and be counted. And, you know, that’s where the leadership is.”

“It’s shocking to me that young Jewish students at Columbia, in New York City, are scared...and going home” he says. But somehow, Mr. Krapt deliberately ignores those hundreds of Jewish students who are protesting the Zionist genocide in Palestine side by side with other students from various backgrounds, including whites, blacks, Christian, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian backgrounds? Are they not Jews? Are they not mingling with Arab and Muslim students? Have they been harassed by their fellow protesters because they're Jewish? Why are the Jewish student protesters not fleeing the "hatred" and going home?

No, Mr. Krapt. Stop the lies and the slander. The amalgamation of upholding Palestine's right to be a free nation with Jew hatred will not work. Despitre the fact that indigenous Palestine has been raped by Zionist Jews, calling for Palestinian self-determination is not Jew-hating. American students of the top US universities are not dumb like the rest of backwater America that you so deftly exploit with your Zionist propaganda. They are smarter and more decent than you or your Goebbels-inspired propaganda.

The Columbias University's chapter of global Hasidic-Orthodox Jewish group - a fundamentalist and racist Orthodox Jewish movement - said Sunday that Jewish students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to “go back to Poland” and “stop killing children”. But they ignore chants by Zionist student protesters to "Kill all the Arabs", or "There is no Palestine", or "expel the human animals", or "Israel only from the River to the Sea", or the attempted assassination of three American students in Vermont because they were wearing the Keffieh headdress. That action by pro-Jewish criminals is not shocking for the likes of Robert "Asian-Handjob" Krapt.

Reports of harassment of Jewish individuals during campus protests are over-exaggerated by Zionist mouthpieces - hundreds of anti-Zionist Jewish students are taking part in the pro-Palestine movements on US university campuses. These over-the-top nags about rising anti-semitism are without any foundation. The only purpose in brandishing the "anti-semitism" scarecrow is to trigger the expected Pavlovian reaction in a western audience conditioned for decades by Zionist propaganda, namely that Jews are the infallable superhuman victims of racism. As soon as they hear the word "antisemite", and like Pavlov's dogs, Westerners immediately have a cold sweat and drool, then they feel guilty and mute their real opinions and conscience, and do not dare question or speak out. As a result, the Palestinian point of view is supressed and silenced in the western media and the public sphere, and no one else's victimhood is allowed to rise to the sublime level of Jew hatred, a commodity that is used and abused by Zionists to deny any other people's suffering. But Muslim and Arab students have also faced threats and disparaging racist comments and insults hurled at them by right-wing fanatic Zionist students on campus since the outbreak of the Middle East conflict this fall.

"Asian-Handjob" Krapt, who graduated from Columbia in 1963, is not that smart in comparing today’s pro-Palestine protests to the antiwar ones he experienced as a student in the 1960s — hailing that era as an “open forum” where “free speech prevailed and people express[ed] their opinion” but without admitting that those 1960's protests led to ending the Vietnam War. It follows that today's protests are also an "open forum" where "free speech will prevail" and will inevitable lead to the liberation of Palestine from the savagery of Israel's war against the Palestinian nation. The protesters were right in the 1960s and the authorities were wrong. "Asian Handjob" Bob Krapt obviously does not want history to repeat itself, whereby today's pro-Palestine students will one day be hailed by history as having been right to fight for a Free Palestine while he and his decaying establishment ilk are quickly sliding into certain defeat.

Krapt went on to attack faculty members who have expressed solidarity with the student protesters. He said the faculty are “more focused on politics than they are on education.” Why is he then, the pedestrian brainless sports club owner, focusing on politics rather than on sports? Earlier this week, Krapt announced he would suspend his financial support of Columbia in response to its handling of the protests. 

Columbia: Tell this blackmailer of academic freedom that you don't need his dirty money. 

Mr. Krapt, go ahead and blackmail the university for not subscribing wholesale to your Zionist racist narrative that denies the existence of a Palestinian nation that was raped, massacred and expelled in order to create an ultra-religious backwater state in Palestine over the ashes of historic Palestine.

It's a sad state of affairs in America where greed for money makes educational institutions happy to be hostage to the political whims of wealthy donors.

 

Fear and Loathing in America: The Zionist Reaction

The Share Price of the “Antisemitism” Commodity Rises Sharply in the Zionist Propaganda Market.

American Zionists and their poodles to retaliate against those expressing their opinion and conscience.

Zionists and their allies propagate the lie of a rise in antisemitism on US campuses in order to terrorize people into silence and suppress pro-Palestine sentiment. There is no more antisemitism today than existed previously. But the commodity of antisemitism is very useful because the entire planet has been “re-educated” by decades of brainwashing and psychological blackmail to fear to express any thought that might disagree with the “official” narrative of Big Zionist Brother.

See below how Jewish students at Columbia University and other campuses across the nation who are defending the rights of the Palestinian people are terrorized by Zionist thugs into revealing their identities out of fear of retaliation. Zionism is adapting to the heightened awareness of the original sin of fabricating the state of Israel by resorting to its Germanic DNA and adopting Nazi methods to repress and suppress their enemies. Unfortunately for them, the old and rusted Palestinian can of worms has now opened wide.

The decision by Columbia University’s president to call in the New York Police Department to clear pro-Palestinian protesters from the campus last week has sparked outrage and strident student protests at universities in New York City and across the country in recent days. The convergence between using violent policing to silence protesters and the subject of the protests itself has crystallized the decades-old submission of American public discourse to one narrative only: That of Israel and its Zionist thugs who draw their inspiration and methods from Goebbels himself.

Last Thursday police arrested 108 Columbia University students. This was 1968-vintage Kent State University about to happen all over again, when the national guard killed several students on their own campus because they were protesting the Vietnam War. Similar protests spontaneously erupted on campuses across the country, including New York University, Yale University, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, among several others.

Students and young people are a beacon and a lens to the future. They hold the ideas that will become mainstream in a couple of decades. The Vietnam War was lost by the US not because of the military pressure from North Vietnam, but by the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who protested for years until the US government decided to end the war in disgrace. Similarly, the trajectory ahead is drawn for the students protesting Israel’s colonial barbarity and the US establishment’s collusion with it: Palestine will finally be free, just like Vietnam. America is currently taking stock of the severe regional and international losses it already is sustaining because of its blind endorsement of the savagery of the Zionist regime in Palestine. On balance, the magnitude of the losses sustained by the US as a result of its collusion with Israel's babarity in Palestine far outweigh any utility the Jewish colony in Palestine may provide. The sad thing is that the US has aligned itself behind a 19^th-century mindset, not unlike that of Vladimir Putin and his expansionist nostalgia for a long-lost empire, namely the Zionist colonial hallucination of establishing a purely Jewish supremacist state over the ashes of historic Palestine. If the US and Israel believe they can emulate Putin by invading Gaza and annexing it by utter violence, they are traveling down the wrong road.

In fact, Gaza is a sideshow to the big dangling fruit Israel has set its eyes on, which is the West Bank. The current Gaza war is a dry run for Israel’s prospective invasion and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. After expelling the Gaza Palestinians into the Sinai, Israel intends to expel the Palestinians of the Galilee - those who stayed in 1948 - into Lebanon, and those of the West Bank will be "escorted" into Jordan. It’s no secret: From the River to the Sea is a Zionist slogan for their Greater Israel biblical trash. Indeed, Israel has deliberately refused to write itself a constitution because that would require it to define its borders in relation to those of its neighbors.

Back to Columbia University. Rachel is a 19-years-old Jewish Columbia student who asked to be identified only by her first name because of fear of retaliation. RETALIATION? IN AMERICA, LAND OF THE FREE? OR IS BIDEN'S AMERICA BECOMING A CLONE OF PUTIN’s RUSSIA? Why retaliation? Because she joined the Free Palestine movement; Retaliation by whom? By the “powers-that-be”, namely the Zionist thugs holding guns to the university president’s head.

It is interesting that the last time a Columbia University president summoned the police to disperse student demonstrators was back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. But even learned university presidents forget their history lessons. “Movements inherently boil when they’re facing extra suppression,” Rachel said. The Columbia students protesting the war have demanded that the school cut financial ties with Israel and divest from Israeli companies, pretty much what university students demanded – and won – to end apartheid in South Africa some 30 years ago., And they have inspired students across the country to do the same. “This is about solidarity," said Alex, another Jewish student at the University of Michigan who is part of the pro-Palestinian movement and also asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear of retaliation. AGAIN? RETALIATION? BY WHOM? "We have colleges all across the nation performing a synchronized act because we work together. This is a collective movement far beyond the United States."

Organizers say they were also inspired by protests against the apartheid government of South Africa that an earlier generation of Michigan students took part in. “It’s never been bigger than it is right now,” said a masked male organizer, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. AGAIN? RETALIATION? BY WHOM? “We’ve seen that this has been effective in achieving concessions from the administration towards divestment from Israel, apartheid and genocide.”

Just like during the Vietnam War, the protests have sparked a backlash from right-wing Trumpian politicians who want university administrators to use violence and crack down hard on the protesters.

Marianne Hirsch, a Jewish Columbia University English professor, said the university president, Nemat Talaat Shafik, an Egyptian-born Muslim who was made Baroness by the  neanderthal English monarch Elizabeth II, has been "squashing peaceful protest, squashing open debate, not allowing students to express their opinions and debate their opinions." And the fact that Shafik summoned the police last Thursday, a day after she was questioned at the congressional hearing, is no coincidence, she said.

"I’m extremely distressed right now to see antisemitism being weaponized and used, misused ... under the guise of safety and security," said Hirsch, whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Decent Jews outnumber the flithy Zionists, but they too have been reduced to silence. Just like the so-called "moderate" Muslims who have been silenced by the virulent Islamic terrorists.

Sueda is a graduate student who helped organize the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid reprisals. AGAIN? RETALIATI? BY WHOM? She said students escalated pressure on the university and started the tent encampments after previous forms of protest did not lead to the intended results.

"Have those protests yielded any material results from the university? Have they yielded an acknowledgment of the pain felt by Palestinians and by the community that is in solidarity with them? Have they yielded any statements of sorrow or regret by the university for their overly punitive treatment of pro-Palestinian students? No," she said.

Oren Root, a longtime New York City lawyer and Columbia University graduate who was at the school when anti-Vietnam War protests rocked it in 1968, said Shafik's summoning of police was "an extraordinary miscalculation."

"President Shafik and her advisers clearly didn't learn from history," said Root, who was a top editor at The Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, in 1968 and 1969. “Calling in the cops was clearly a mistake. Things have not gotten any calmer.” The decision in 1968 by university President Grayson Kirk to have the police forcibly remove protesters from the buildings they were occupying only inflamed the situation and tarnished Columbia's reputation for many years, Root said, adding that Columbia appears to have chosen a side in the Gaza battle.

Pro-Palestinian encampments have also been established at other schools that have been the sites of anti-Israel demonstrations, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

Given all the preceding, WHO IS REALLY EXPERIENCING FEAR ON CAMPUSES THESE DAYS? The hypothetical victim-status blackmailers? Or those speaking up for justice and for the truth?

 

US-Enabled Jewish Settler Violence in Palestine Goes Unpunished

Why rights groups say so many Palestinians in the West Bank are being attacked with impunity
CBC
Tue, April 23, 2024


Abdullatif Abu Alia kneels over a pillow soaked with dried blood from where he said his cousin, 25-year-old Jehad Abu Alia, bled to death after being shot in the head after his property was besieged on April 12 by Israeli settlers in the village of Al Mughayyir in the occupied West Bank. (Lily Martin/CBC - image credit)

For years, even decades, human rights groups that monitor the occupied West Bank have implored Israel's allies to take steps to punish Jewish settlers and members of Israel's military who attack Palestinians and seem to carry out their actions with impunity.

And so when word came over the weekend that Israel's closest ally, the United States, reportedly plans to hold members of an Israeli military battalion composed of ultra-orthodox and religious nationalist members accountable, they saw it as progress.

Earlier, the United States and Europe had placed economic and travel sanctions on a few key settlers believed to be responsible for instigating attacks, but implementing penalties and putting restrictions on a branch of the Israel Defence Forces is unprecedented.

Israel's government was indignant and rejected the suggestion that the military unit should be singled out.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said imposing sanctions on the Netzah Yehuda battalion while the war against Hamas still rages and the unit is fighting in Gaza "casts a heavy shadow" on other IDF units.

And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested the potential U.S. measure was "the peak of absurdity and a moral low," as he vowed to fight it.

Nasser Nasser/The Associated Press

A series of U.S. statutes, known as the Leahy Laws, prohibit U.S. military assistance from being transferred to organizations that the U.S. State Department determines have committed human rights abuses.

And by many accounts, the abuses attributed to Netzah Yehuda during its decades-long time as enforcers of Israel's rules in the West Bank are about as bad as they get.

In one incident in 2022, members of the unit dragged a 78-year-old American Palestinian man, Omar Assad, from his car after being stopped at a checkpoint. He was bound, gagged, blindfolded and beaten. An autopsy concluded he died of a heart attack from the stress of the encounter.

Violent rampages against property, Palestinians say

While the U.S. move is linked to events that happened before Oct. 7, the potential sanctions come at a time when violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has reached new levels in the aftermath of Hamas's attacks on southern Israel.

There have been violent rampages against Palestinian homes, businesses and property almost every day of late, in many cases with Israeli soldiers present, but not intervening to stop the rampages, say Palestinians who witnessed them.

Palestinian officials say more than 486 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, many in military raids and others from attacks by settlers.

Wave of settler violence in occupied West Bank

The United Nations has recorded 774 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the past six months, with Israeli soldiers present in nearly half the attacks. Human Rights Watch says the violence has forced Palestinians to flee at least seven communities permanently.

In its most recent report encapsulating the whole of the year — both before and after Oct. 7 — the UN said 2023 was the worst year for settler attacks on Palestinians in any year since tracking started in 2006.

"If you want to solve the problem, you have to go after the government that's responsible for allowing this to happen," said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch.

"The reason why we're seeing this unprecedented increase in settler violence is because of decades of impunity for settler violence," he told CBC News in an interview in Ramallah.

"They [settlers] are armed by the Israeli government. They are sometimes directly encouraged to carry out attacks, and they're doing so in more and more areas that the Israeli government covets for settlements."

In a What's App message to CBC News, the IDF said its role is to "protect the property and lives of all citizens," and that security forces have "means to disperse demonstrations." 

 

Lily Martin/CBC

A team from CBC News recently spent time in the village of Al Mughayyir, about 27 kilometres northeast of Ramallah, which was the site of a deadly rampage by hundreds of settlers on April 12.

Over the following two days and nights, other Palestinian villages nearby were also burned, causing damage to 60 properties and more than 100 vehicles, according to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.

We visited the scene of a deadly shooting at the home of Abdullatif Abu Alia.

A blood-soaked pillow and blanket on the flat roof of his home marked the spot where he said his cousin, Jehad Abu Alia, bled to death.

"Hundreds of settlers besieged the house," he told CBC News.

Jehad Abu Alia, 25, was visiting his extended family when the home was suddenly surrounded by masked settlers, many carrying guns, and others throwing rocks.

Abu Alia said his family barricaded themselves inside as windows were smashed and vehicles outside set on fire.

Abu Alia said at one point, someone on the ground fired shots at their position on the top of the building and Jehad was hit in the head.

 

Lily Martin/CBC

"The army was helping [the settlers] and they stopped all kinds of ambulances and medical people from coming to help the injured," Abu Alia said.

With no way to get his cousin to hospital, Abu Alia said all he could do was to try to stop the blood gushing from the wound himself, in what turned out to be a futile effort to save his life.

The trigger for the Al Mughayyir rampage was the disappearance that morning of a 14-year-old Israeli teenager and sheep herder, Benjamin Achimeir.

Not long after the mob attack began, a police drone spotted his body not far from the outskirts of Al Mughayyir.

Although the circumstances of his death remain unexplained by Israeli authorities, Netanyahu called it a "heinous murder."

On Monday morning, the IDF, Israel's internal security agency Shin Bet and Israeli police announced they had arrested a 21-year-old Palestinian. The statement said he had "implicated himself" in the teen's death after an interrogation by Shin Bet.

Since the violence in Al Mughayyir, there have been several attacks by settlers in the West Bank, including one this past weekend that killed a Palestinian ambulance driver who came to help the injured in the town of As-Sawiya, according to the Palestinian Health Authority.

"Since Oct. 7, we have seen an unprecedented integration of violent settlers into the security forces," said Shakir, of Human Rights Watch.

"So whereas before there was a clear differentiation between security forces and settlers, you have increasing situations where settlers are wearing army uniforms."

Settler population increased

Under successive Israeli governments, the settler population has surged, growing 15 per cent in the last five years, according to one study by the pro-settler group WestBankJewishPopulationStats.com.

There are now more 517,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with 200,000 Jewish settlers living in occupied areas of East Jerusalem.

The United Nations considers the Jewish settlements to be illegal, as do Canada and many other Western countries.

Palestinian officials say more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, with Israel's military flattening vast parts of the territory in an effort to destroy Hamas.

Israeli settlers and U.S. blamed for West Bank violence

During the CBC News visit to Al Mughayyir, our team also met with Palestinian shepherd Imad Abu Alia.

He said in the months leading up to the attack on the village, settlers from several nearby communities had been using drones to watch his property and track his herd of sheep while they grazed.

During the mayhem in Al Mughayyir, he said a group came onto his farm and burned his barn, killing some of his sheep and stealing the rest of the 120 animals in his herd.

Lily Martin/CBC

When he tried to save his flock, he said the mob attacked him, leaving him with a neck brace and immobilized in bed.

"They beat me so much to the point that I saw death with my own eyes," he told CBC News.

Without his sheep to support his family, Abu Alia said he does not know what he will do.

"These sheep are like my children," he said. "I just want them back."

Lily Martin/CBC

Rights groups say seizing the livestock of Palestinians and constructing grazing outposts has become a new tactic of the settlers, as it deprives Palestinians of an income and often forces them to abandon their properties.

CBC News asked Israel's military for more details on the death of Benjamin Achimeir.

In a WhatsApp message, the IDF said that there were "signs of violence" but did not provide further details.

With regards to Palestinian allegations about the conduct of Israeli soldiers in Al Mughayyir, the IDF said complaints "about soldiers' behaviour that is not in accordance with orders will be examined."

Regarding the allegations that security forces held up ambulances and prevented the wounded from reaching hospital, the IDF said that was necessary for a "security check" before the ambulances were given the authorization to continue.

Israeli human rights group Yesh Din says between 2005 and 2022, 93 per cent of investigations against settlers who attacked Palestinians were closed without any charges.

 

Columbia Univ Jewish Students and Professors: We are not Antisemites

Jewish students and professors speak out against claims Columbia protests are antisemitic

Richard Hall

Thu, April 25, 2024

In the week since a protest camp exploded across the grounds of Columbia University in solidarity with Gaza, PhD student Jonathan Ben-Menachem has been fielding worried calls from his family. They had been watching the news and were concerned for his safety.

"I’ve had to reassure them that I am not about to get mobbed by antisemites anytime I go to campus,” he told The Independent. “It’s just people trying to take a stand for what they think is right, very peacefully.”

Mr. Ben-Menachem is one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel over the war in Gaza.

He said he has watched with amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a central role in them.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia and other US universities “antisemitic mobs” that are taking over “leading universities,” on Wednesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University on Wednesday and called those protesting “lawless agitators” and “antisemitic.”

Mr. Ben-Menachem said his experience on campus had been completely different.

“There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism, but it’s just a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground playing games, chanting and doing homework. There was a Passover Seder held on Monday,” Mr. Ben-Menachem said. “It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.”

Student protests over the war in Gaza have been common across college campuses since the war in Gaza broke out in October, following a surprise Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel. The resulting war has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and aid blockages have resulted in famine conditions in northern Gaza, creating a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of schools, and all of Gaza’s 12 universities, have been damaged or destroyed since the Israeli attacks began.

After Columbia University ordered the New York Police Department to break up a protest camp on its campus last week, leading to the arrests of more than 100 students, the protests have spread across the country and grown into a movement that some have compared to the student-led protests against the Vietnam War of the 1960s. Similar protests have since erupted at Yale and New York University (where arrests were also made), Ohio State University, Stanford University and Berkeley, to name a few.

The protests at Columbia in particular drew national attention due to videos of several antisemitic incidents near the campus, including one in which someone shouted “Go back to Poland” at a group of Jewish students. In a separate incident, the Columbia chapter of the Orthodox Jewish movement Chabad said Jewish students had been told to “Go back to Europe.”

While Mr. Ben-Menachem said there had been credible reports of antisemitism in and around the campus, they were not representative of the hundreds of protesters who had camped out to protest against Israel’s war. What concerned him more than outside agitators was the university’s attempts to crack down on the protests — including the rumours that it may soon enlist the National Guard to intervene.

“We’re terrified that there’s going to be a second Kent State at Columbia,” he said, referring to the killing of four unarmed college students at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970 during protests over the Vietnam War.

“It’s absurd to say that they're gonna bring in the National Guard and the NYPD to protect Jews when it’s actually Jews who are being arrested,” he added.

Sarah, a Jewish student at Columbia who asked for only her first name to be published, was among those arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties, after they moved in on the camp on Thursday. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.

“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”

Sarah said she too had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been “weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

“There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. I have so much love for the Jewish people of my community, we just have a political dispute, and that’s it.”

The crackdown on protests has also drawn criticism from staff. Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, which is partnered with Columbia University, was among nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members to write to Columbia president Nemat Shafik before the protests broke out, ahead of her appearance at a Congressional committee on antisemitism on campus, warning against the “weaponization of antisemitism” at Columbia by politicians eager to stoke division.

She told The Independent it was the university’s decision to bring the NYPD onto campus that “inflamed” the situation and “shut down spaces of debate.”

“It’s not the students who have created the chaos,” said Professor Milanich. “It’s the leadership of the university that has participated in this ridiculous police raid and has thrown the faculty and students of the university under the bus.

“Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties?  I don’t feel safer,” she said.

Professor Milanich said the protesters at the encampment had written a code of conduct for inclusion and held training events on de-escalation to prevent extremists from outside causing trouble.

Protestors also have a clear set of demands, asking for the university to divest from companies that help fund Israel’s war in Gaza, which Columbia College students voted on in a referendum and passed with over 75 per cent of the vote.

“The story is fundamentally not one of ‘pro-Hamas mobs’ running rampant on campus,” said Professor Milanich. “The story is of an administration that’s thrown the values of the university to the wind.”