Mideast War blowback

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For more about the specific issue being protested here, see the separate thread Israeli settler support infrastructure here in the U.S.A..

Anti-Israel 'rage playdate' staged outside Chuck Schumer's home

I have always despised people using their children to score political points.

My concern would be that they took their kids to a protest that "did not receive the proper permits" (did they even apply for the relevant permits?), thereby possibly putting their kids in harm's way.

Two teenagers from Ottawa plotted to bomb a pro-Israel rally in Canada, before they were arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, according to Global News this week.

The boys were arrested in December and February over a terror plot targeting Ottawa's Jewish community.

“They are alleged to have formed a plan last fall to violently attack Jewish persons in Ottawa, possibly through the detonation of an explosive device at a pro-Israel rally,” Global News stated, citing the Department of Justice.

According to Global News, one of the boys was in possession of acetone, oxidizer and metal ball bearings. These are often used to construct bombs.

Global News quoted Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Center as saying that the plot was linked to ISIS, but was likely "accelerated" following Hamas's massacre of October 7.

“Although radicalization of these individuals reportedly began prior to the October 2023 Hamas attack, at least one of the individuals was reportedly in contact with DAESH overseas and the arrests occurred during a period of DAESH calls to violence in response to the conflict.”

All American universities must end campus antisemitism or they will lose accreditation, President-elect Donald Trump promised during a rally against antisemitism in Washington.

To “defeat antisemitism and defend Jewish citizens in America,” Trump said he would inform every college president that if they do not “end antisemitic propaganda,” they would lose accreditation and federal support.

“We will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers, and we’re not going to do it – certainly on American soil,” he said.

Trump added that once in the Oval Office, he would inform all educational institutions that if they permit violence or harassment against Jewish students, they will be “held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.”

“It’s very important – Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law, and they’re going to get it,” he said. “At the same time, my administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students and Jewish people on American streets.”

Trump's actions to combat antisemitism
In his first term as US president, Trump issued an executive order on combating antisemitism by adding Jews to the list of protected minority groups under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

A performance in the Netherlands by Israeli band, Yemen Blues was canceled due to threats, De Telegraaf reported on Thursday.

The performance at the PAARD venue in Hague was canceled Wednesday night due to threats to the band, which includes Yemenite-Jewish members, PAARD director Majel Blonden confirmed.

The threats were made by Pro-Palestinian groups over social media and called for protestors to gather outside the venue.

Blonden explained it was a difficult decision to cancel the event, adding, "We maintained close contact with the police throughout. Ensuring the safety of our artists, staff, and visitors was paramount. We couldn’t guarantee that."

The decision to cancel was made by the PAARD management team in consultation with police.

A spokesperson for Hague Mayor Jan van Zanen stated that the event wasn't canceled by the mayor, confirming that PAARD made the decision.

Perhaps the kids reduce the likelihood of an unnecessarily violent response from police.

Unless I am missing something the Advanced Center for Diamond Technology has nothing to do with the plight of the Palestinians and Lebanese. This has some similarities with fundamentalists who tried to erase any trace of rock music because like Israel rock music was seen as pure evil.

As I posted earlier, unlike the New Jersey event, a similar event in Los Angeles turned violent.

Synagogue hosted Israel real estate event]

The protest stemmed from an Israel real estate event on Sunday at the Adas Torah synagogue, according to the synagogue’s security director and social media posts from organizers.

The event at the synagogue was promoted by a firm called My Home in Israel Real Estate, a group that has helped to facilitate marketing events for potential property sales in Israel and the West Bank to Jewish Americans.

That is certainly a possibility, now that I think of it. That might actually be a valid tactical reason for bringing kids to a protest, at least for now.

It still seems to me there could be potential bad consequences, though. (For example, the cops and/or unsympathetic onlookers might decide to call CPS on the protesters.)

I notice that this news story was organized in such a way as to bury what the protest was actually about.

The first part of the story emphasizes that the protest took place outside a synagogue, making it seem as if the protest was against the synagogue per se, or a disruption of Jewish worship. In other words, just plain hatred of Jews.

But then, buried down in the middle of the article, the following is finally mentioned:


In other words, a commercial real estate event that was, in all likelihood, promoting violations of international law. (For more about this issue, see my separate thread Israeli settler support infrastructure here in the U.S.A..)

So the protest was not against the synagogue itself, but against a separate organization renting a meeting hall there. Moreover, the protested event was on a Sunday afternoon, i.e. not during the Jewish Sabbath and not during Jewish worship.

Pro-Palestinian vandals invaded the home of University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, on Thursday, damaging her car and leaving pro-Hamas symbols, the university confirmed in a statement.

University spokesperson Victor Balta said in an email Thursday evening that “several masked perpetrators” invaded Cauce’s home, where they slashed the tires to her car and painted “pro-Hamas symbols” across multiple surfaces. Videos circulating online show inverted triangles being painted onto home’s walls.

Those recorded promised, “you will not know peace until you meet the demands of our movement.”

“Free Palestine” and “blood on your hands” were also spray painted on Cause’s property.

“Making threats against a public official in an attempt to intimidate them is a crime,” Balta said in the statement. She confirmed that police were investigating the incident and that it “will not influence University policy.”

A Jewish alumni group, verified by the Seattle Times, condemned the attack, writing on X, “We unequivocally condemn this despicable behavior, and look to @SeattlePD and incoming AG @NickBrownNow to find and prosecute these lawbreakers. @UW”
Behind the attack
The alumni group also connected the incident to the Instagram page ‘Escalate Seattle’ which claimed to be sharing the video on behalf of anonymous students.

“ANA MARI FUNDS GENOCIDE This morning, Ana Mari woke up at her residential home in Lake City to red paint splattered on her front door and a message on her car, declaring ‘Ana Mari Funds Genocide.’ In the lead-up to today's UW Board of Regents meeting, members of the community wanted to send a strong reminder to Ana Mari of her complicity in the genocide of Palestinians. In addition, flyers listing campus demands and quotes exposing her loyalty to Boeing-primary supplier of weapons for the zionist genocide [sic] - were wheatpasted [sic] on her house and left in her neighbors mailboxes,” the anonymous students allegedly wrote. “Cauce does not get to live a comfortable life or have a positive reputation while snuggling up to war profiteers. While Ana Mari and the Board of Regents use the bureaucratic process in an attempt to stall out the movement for Palestinian liberation, we will not be deceived or demobilized. Our movement will continue to escalate until the demands for cutting ties with war-profiteer Boeing and divestment from zionism [sic] are met.

"Until UW ends their relationship with Boeing and academically and materially divests from zionism [sic], we will continue to apply pressure on Ana Mari and her accomplices, in all aspects of their life. The power of the people far outweighs the power of blood money from Boeing and other arms of US imperialism. To Ana Mari and the rest of the Board of Regents: you will not know peace until you meet the demands of our movement. The clock is ticking…”

That specific real estate agency has been selling homes in the West Bank many times.

https://theintercept.com/2024/07/09/west-bank-settlement-israel-real-estate/

We have had similar situations in Sweden regarding mosques facilitating crimes of terrorism. I have no problem calling them out for what they do and demanding proper consequences.

Hundreds of posters depicting Jewish faculty members as “wanted” were plastered across the University of Rochester campus in upstate New York on Sunday night, an antisemitic act the school’s president told CNN “would not be tolerated.”

The posters criticize faculty members for their alleged response to the war in Gaza. One poster accuses a faculty member of “ethnic cleansing” and “displacement of Palestinians.” A different poster accuses another faculty member of “racism,” “hate speech” and intimidation.

“I want to be as clear as I can that the University of Rochester strongly denounces the recent display of ‘Wanted’ posters targeting senior University leaders and members of our faculty, staff, and Board of Trustees,” university President Sarah Mangelsdorf said in a statement Tuesday. “This act is disturbing, divisive and intimidating and runs counter to our values as a university.”

One of the targets of the vandalism, Gregory Heyworth, associate professor of English and computer science, told CNN in an email he was grateful to the university for its public stance and for the president’s “clear condemnation of the antisemitism of the posters.”

Heyworth said he “was accused of ‘threatening to dox’ protesting students, in a poster that actually committed the offense of doxing.”

The professor noted the hypocrisy of the vandals, “their willingness to push the boundaries of anti-democratic behavior and infringe on free-speech – to lie, distort, and propagandize – while relying upon those same democratic values for cover.”

University Public Safety Chief Quchee Collins in a letter posted on the school’s website called the incident “an act of vandalism” whose goal it seemed is to “intimidate members of our University community.” He said his department is investigating.

This is not the first incident targeting the university’s Jewish community. Swastikas and antisemitic language written on the River Campus tunnel walls were discovered in February, according to the university. The Department of Public Safety promptly removed the “harmful symbols and words,” the university said.

I’m just tired. It’s been a long year and I want peace desperately, but doing things like this, targeting faculty, administration and staff to intimidate them and spread hate while also just making more work for the maintenance staff is wrong,” a Jewish student at the University of Rochester, who declined to be identified, fearing retribution, told CNN on Tuesday.

“Yesterday we were scared and worried,” the student said. “Today we work towards understanding and peace.”

Another Jewish student, who also declined to be identified, fearing retribution, said they discovered the posters around 10 p.m. on Sunday.

“When I first saw this, I was horrified and upset,” the student said.

The Department of Public Safety was made aware of the posters and removed them.

“This process is painstaking because of the strong adhesive used to affix the posters, which in some cases caused damage to walls, floors, chalkboards, and other surfaces,” Collins said.

Some of the uptick in antisemitism and hostility toward Israel over the past year has been criminal — assault, vandalism, bomb threats — but much more of it, especially among critics of Israel, has fallen outside of the legal realm. It is essentially about the expression of people’s beliefs: That Zionists should be shunned, for example, or that Hamas represents legitimate resistance to Israel’s actions toward Palestinians.

Many Jewish organizations have been trying to employ legal tools to crack down on the public promotion of these beliefs, which they see as harassment or worse of Jewish people, especially on college campuses. They are likely to find allies in the new Republican administration.

For example, back in October 2023, the Anti-Defamation League teamed up with Ken Marcus, a top civil rights official in the last Trump administration, to ask nearly 200 university presidents to investigate whether their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine were “providing material support to Hamas.”

That would be a serious felony, since the United States designated Hamas a terror organization decades ago. I am unaware of any evidence of student activists funneling financial or other things considered “material support,” which federal law defines as providing “funds, goods or services” to a terrorist group that the group would have otherwise had to spend its own money on. In the past, when when pro-Palestinian groups have been successfully prosecuted under such statutes, the allegations have centered not on speech or political activity but on the actual transfer of funds from American donors to Palestinians affiliated with Hamas.

But that could change under the next Trump administration. Project Esther, drafted by some of the same influential GOP policymakers who assembled Project 2025, has suggested using a host of laws to target what it describes as a “Hamas Support Network,” composed of groups including Jewish Voice for Peace, the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Those laws include the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act and unnamed “counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws.”

Using immigration laws to punish immigrant activists engaged in otherwise legal political activism would raise serious civil liberties concerns. Several leading Jewish groups complained that they were shut out of the planning process for Project Esther, so it remains to be seen whether they would support taking the measures it suggests.

One hint, though, may lie in AIPAC and the ADL having endorsed legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to classify a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status without first going to court. That classification would effectively destroy the group’s ability to raise money.

The bill failed to advance in the House on Tuesday, winning a majority but not the required two-thirds. But it could be revived in the next Congress, despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union, Bend the Arc, Workers Circle and more than 100 other mostly liberal nonprofits. They argued that “the lack of guardrails creates the potential for future administrations to weaponize these powers against groups on both ends of the ideological spectrum.”