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ANTI-SEMITISM

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In Melbourne, the Latest Pogrom Roger Franklin

By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/in-melbourne-the-latest-pogrom/

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.

Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”

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Free Speech vs Personal Safety Peter O’Brien

By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/free-speech-vs-personal-safety/

“Yes, Jewish Australians – even though you have contributed to this nation since the First Fleet and even though your families and friends are being murdered in Israel, and elsewhere, by the very forces these wielders of free speech are promoting – toughen up.”

Free speech has gotten a bit of a run recently, following, inter alia, the Glastonbury kerfuffle and the Wassim Haddad ruling.

Our esteemed editor in chief, Rebecca Weisser, has a powerful piece in the Spectator about Glastonbury, the appalling behaviour of some of the performers, and the crass stupidity of the BBC in allowing some segments to go to air.  She makes some pretty uncontroversial points – indeed, unarguable, in my view.  And yet, she attracted a number of unfavourable comments, a couple of which I reproduce below.

John Jacobsen opined:

Rebecca Weisser’s piece reads like someone clutching pearls while the rest of the world’s trying to have an honest convo. Yeah, some stuff said at Glastonbury was intense—but that’s literally what free speech protects: the right to say provocative, uncomfortable things. You don’t have to agree with the artists, but trying to paint a whole music festival as a jihadist warm-up act is just unhinged. Art is messy. Politics is messy. Get over it. This is like the Trumpification of conservatism. Dumbed down into right-wing “woke”.

And Sirtony added:

If you support free speech, and I do, you have to put up with stupid speech that you find offensive. You, of course, are fully entitled to argue about those views and to say why you find them wrong or offensive. Free speech is useless if we only allow those we agree with to speak. As fashions ebb and flow, what else might be banned that you might actually be sympathetic towards. Stop and think before agreeing to many limits on free speech. Our traditional limits have been on the incitement to violence or the classic shouting “fire” in the crowded theatre not the expression of a political idea.

Is chanting “death, death to the IDF” inciting violence? The argument can be made that it is, but seriously does anyone expect any of these idiots to take on the Israeli military; it is performative nonsense.

The aim of this article is to provide a counterpoint to these opinions, but a couple of specific comments before I proceed.  Firstly, the performers were undoubtedly trying to turn the festival into a ‘jihadist warm-up’ act, and the organisers allowed them to politicize an artistic event. 

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Columbia Cannot Be Trusted To Negotiate by Seth Mandel

By on July 6th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-cannot-be-trusted-to-negotiate/

When the Trump administration accused Columbia University of violating the civil rights of its Jewish students, the school risked losing both its federal funding and even its accreditation. At the time, the preferred outcome for everyone seemed to be to have both sides come to an agreement that would alleviate the government’s concerns and reinstate Columbia’s funding.

Now, however, it’s not clear at all that the university can be trusted to negotiate a deal. Nor is it clear that whoever speaks for Columbia today will still be speaking for Columbia tomorrow or next week. It might be time to step back and have Columbia get its house in order before resuming talks.

In late March, Columbia agreed to terms laid out by the federal government in order to have $400 million of federal funding restored. Immediately the faculty and students pushed back on interim President Katrina Armstrong, who had taken over for Minouche Shafik in August. Armstrong wavered. She is no longer the president of Columbia.

Claire Shipman is, having become the institution’s third president in a period of seven months. Last month, Shipman was notified that the school’s accreditation was under review thanks to Columbia’s refusal to reform its practices to bring them in line with federal civil-rights law. Welcome to the big leagues, Claire Shipman.

Before accepting the divine punishment of being made president of Columbia, Shipman was its trustee board’s co-chair, so she isn’t new to this particular fight. In fact, Shipman appeared alongside Shafik and other school officials to testify at an April 2024 congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. Both Shafik and Shipman were very, very sad about what was happening to Jews on their campus under their watch. Meanwhile, as soon as Shafik and Shipman and Co. shipped off to Capitol Hill, the student body left behind in Morningside Heights built a tentifada encampment in defiance of Shafik’s expressed conciliation.

At that April 2024 hearing, Shipman had said: “We have a moral crisis on our campus.” She wasn’t wrong. But Shipman was part of that moral crisis. Just three months before that hearing, Shipman had argued in a text that “We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board. Quickly I think. Somehow.”

As the Free Beacon reported yesterday, Shipman had a plan to achieve that “somehow.” The board could get rid of Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish trustee who’d been outspoken against anti-Semitism on campus.

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‘Death to IDF’: Pro-Palestine protesters storm Jewish restaurant Story by James Rothwell

By on July 6th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/07/05/death-idf-pro-palestine-protesters-storm-israeli-restaurant/

Rioters in Melbourne set fire to a synagogue and ransacked an Israeli restaurant while shouting “death to the IDF” as the notorious chant used at Glastonbury appeared to spread to Australia.

Jewish community leaders in the city said they suffered two anti-Semitic attacks within half an hour of each other on Friday, as they called for the “full force of the law” to be used against the perpetrators.

The words “death, death to the IDF” were chanted by the British punk musician Bob Vylan during his performance at the Glastonbury music festival last week, triggering an avalanche of criticism of the BBC which live streamed the performance.

The rioters who entered the restaurant threw chairs, smashed glasses, overturned tables and threw food around as the diners fled, Australian news outlet 7News reported.

Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, has condemned the attacks and said he would offer federal government support to state authorities in Victoria.

“Those responsible for these shocking acts must face the full force of the law and my government will provide all necessary support toward this effort,” he said.

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How Anti-Zionism Became a Western Rite A political movement rooted in ancient Jew-hatred is now a generational identity

By on July 5th, 2025

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/antizionism-became-western-rite

It’s official: Jew hatred is trending among millennials and older Gen Z. On June 28, the rapper Bobby Vylan’s chants of “Death, death to the IDF” were broadcast by the BBC and enthusiastically echoed by tens of thousands of people in the live audience of 200,000 at the Glastonbury Festival, many of whom were waving Palestinian flags. “Hell yeah, from the river to the sea,” intoned the aptly named Vylan, “Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, it will be free!” Vylan’s performance was a coda to Zohran Mamdani’s June 24 victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a city with the largest population of Jews (1.3 million) outside of Tel Aviv. Mamdani—who supports the boycott, divest, sanctions movement, has expressed his “love” for convicted funders of Hamas, and has defended calls to “globalize the intifada”—got 52 percent of the under-45 vote among primary voters.

Many of Vylan’s fans and Mamdani’s base of young, white, college-educated, and affluent voters would doubtless agree that “there is only one solution, intifada, revolution!” But what problem is this globalized intifada intended to solve? Evidently, it’s not just Israel, but also the West, whose foundational values and successes the Jewish state epitomizes. The “solution,” therefore, is not simply to cleanse the land of Jews “from the river to the sea” but also to eradicate Western civilization.

Open hatred of Jews flourishes in periods of societal instability and license, when the decency and decorum that protects them from assault by their fellow citizens is suspended. The claim that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in the preparation of Passover matzoh offered an excuse to torture and murder whole communities from the 12th century until at least 1946, when 42 Jews were slaughtered for it in Kielce, Poland. Today, the “blood libel” is back in a new form: the allegation that Israel is targeting Gazans, particularly children, for genocide. Propagated by people who inwardly despise Christianity’s moral and spiritual teachings, including far-right antisemites, this malicious falsehood has fueled widespread indignation and outrage in the West. Some have taken matters into their own hands, targeting Jews for violence wherever they may be found.

In celebrating the spilled blood and broken bodies of Jews, the motley assembly of antisemites has replaced God’s bond with a modern-day pagan cult.

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Love Island USA: does Gen Z have an anti-Semitism problem? Jewish contestant Elan Bibas’s social-media accounts have been flooded with Israelophobic bile. Hannah Kotkin

By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/love-island-usa-does-gen-z-have-an-anti-semitism-problem/

The seventh season of Love Island USA is taking America by storm. Already, it’s the second-most watched streaming show on television this summer, with a whopping 1.2 billion minutes viewed across the first nine episodes of the series. But it isn’t just the young, attractive singles that have caused a stir recently. It now seems the mere presence of a Jewish contestant is enough to cause controversy.

Last week, a show usually known for providing vapid entertainment took a surprisingly sinister turn. Rather than oohing and aahing over the abs, tattoos and five-inch inseam swimming trunks of the six men, social media erupted with rage. The vitriol was directed at Elan Bibas, a 24-year-old Jewish Canadian who had arrived at Love Island’s ‘Casa Amor’.

Love Island might only be a TV show, and one aimed at a young demographic at that. But such is its popularity that the commentary around it, particularly when it turns hateful, cannot be ignored. In some ways, it reflects the thinking of a generation.

The show’s concept is simple. Attractive singles are sent to an island – in this case, somewhere in Fiji – and must remain ‘coupled’ or face expulsion. The winning couple nets $100,000.

The combination of skimpy outfits and raunchy challenges – examples include ‘kissing booths’ and truth or dare – has proved particularly addictive for a Gen Z audience. The timing of the show is also deliberate: it’s currently summer break in the US, which means students are free to tune into the show on the six nights of the week that it airs. Its booming young audience has developed an almost parasocial relationship with the contestants. Bibas has now found himself at the centre of this cultural phenomenon – not, however, in a pleasant way.

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Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’ The burning of Jews in Boulder, Colorado speaks to the lethal intolerance of Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/karen-diamond-killed-by-anti-zionism/

A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.

Officialdom has expressed grief over Diamond’s tragic yielding to the fires of Jew hate that swept Pearl Street Mall four weeks ago. The City of Boulder has extended its ‘heartfelt condolences’ for the loss of this good, long life to an ‘anti-Semitic attack’. But you will search in vain for commentary from ‘anti-racists’. The activist classes are shamefully and horrendously mute. Opinion-makers who pose as ‘anti-fascist’ seem blissfully unbothered by this fascistic horror that entailed the death by fire of a Jew. There will be no ‘George Floyd treatment’ for Karen Diamond.

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Ian Kingsbury George Mason University’s Disastrous President Gregory Washington has backed racially discriminatory DEI programs and failed to address campus anti-Semitism.

By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/george-mason-university-president-gregory-washington-dei-anti-semitism

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, among others, have come under fire or been forced out in recent years for failures of leadership on campus anti-Semitism and racially discriminatory DEI programs. Yet Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University, has managed to keep his job despite similar failures. Mason may not be an Ivy League school, but anti-Semitism and discrimination are problems at nonelite public universities, too. Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.

Mason’s Board of Visitors selected Washington in 2020, just as woke fever was reaching its peak. Upon appointment, Washington committed Mason to being “a national exemplar of antiracism and inclusive excellence.” True to his word, Washington built a gigantic diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, with 7.4 DEI staff per 100 tenure-track faculty members. This was the second-highest ratio among the more than 70 universities the Heritage Foundation examined

Despite President Trump’s executive order calling out DEI bureaucracies for promoting illegal discrimination, and a Supreme Court decision prohibiting racial preferences, Washington has refused to scale back his DEI efforts. His commitment to DEI surpasses his concern for the legal liability those activities impose on Mason.

Washington’s ideological commitments also eclipse his obligation to follow the law when it comes to face-coverings worn by campus protesters. Virginia law forbids wearing a mask to conceal one’s identity in public. Courts have upheld that law—created in response to the state’s experience with the KKK—as constitutional, and the state attorney general advised universities to amend their policies to prohibit face-coverings at protests.

All major public universities in Virgina complied—except for George Mason. Instead, it merely requires protesters to show identification upon request, a policy that is impractical to implement and does not actually align with the law. Washington claimed to favor this approach out of concern for free speech, even though courts have ruled that concealing one’s identity during a public protest is not protected speech.

Meantime, anti-Semitic activity at George Mason is on the rise. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has subjected the university to investigation for its failure to protect the civil rights of Jewish students during both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mason students were arrested for planning anti-Semitic violence in two incidents last year. In the first, police searched the home of two sisters who led the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, finding an illegal gun and “pro-terror materials, including Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Jews,’” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

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Schumer Flips on Antisemitism by Rafael Medoff

By on July 2nd, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/382488/schumer-flips-on-antisemitism/

 Israeli ambassador Abba Eban was greeted by an irritating sight when he rose to speak in Harvard University’s Sanders Hall on a chilly Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1970. A group of anti-­Israel extremists in the gallery had unfurled a banner denouncing “Zionist imperialists” and tried to shout Eban down when he began to speak.

    Half a century later, another group of extremists, including Zohran Mamdani—now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City—employed similar tactics in their own anti-Israel protests.

    Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has cited Eban’s response to the Israel-haters as a transformative event in his own political life. Schumer’s very different response to the Israel-hater Mamdani reflects his own curious transformation.

    Schumer, who in 1970 was a Harvard undergraduate, was in the audience the night Eban spoke. He was so moved by the ambassador’s rebuke of the radicals that he spoke about it at length in what was arguably the most important speech of his life, delivered on the senate floor in November 2023.

    As Schumer rose to speak that day, anti-Israel protests, often mixing with blatant antisemitism, were erupting on college campuses and beyond. Schumer, who by then was the senate majority leader, was shocked at the refusal of many of his fellow-Democrats to acknowledge that antisemitism was coming from their own political camp.

    The reality, Schumer told his visibly discomfited colleagues, was that the people expressing antisemitism after the October 7 massacres “are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.” He continued: “The vitriol against Israel in the wake of October 7th is all too often crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations in this country—­if ever.”

    Sen. Schumer then recalled with admiration the way Ambassador Eban responded to the hecklers in 1970. “Eban pointed his finger up at the protesters in the gallery, and with his Etonian inflection, he calmly but strongly delivered a statement I will never forget,” Schumer recalled. 

    Schumer then quoted Eban’s words: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery. Every time a people gets their statehood, you applaud it. The Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Zambians, you applaud their getting statehood. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it—­ and that is the Jewish people. We Jews are used to that. We have lived with a double standard through the centuries. There were always things the Jews couldn’t do. . . . Everyone could be a farmer, but not the Jew. Everyone could be a carpenter, but not the Jew. Everyone could move to Moscow, but not the Jew. And everyone can have their own state, but not the Jew. There is a word for that: antisemitism, and I accuse you in the gallery of it.”

    The audience of more than 2,000 “broke into heavy applause,” The Harvard Crimson reported. Young Charles Schumer never forgot that moment.

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Social Media Campaign Targets ‘Ivory Tower Hypocrites’ By Sara Dogan

By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/social-media-campaign-targets-ivory-tower-hypocrites/

Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have become cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting opinion is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

The Freedom Center’s Spring 2025 Campus Campaign targeted these elite universities and their leaders as “Ivory Tower Hypocrites” in a published report and a wide-reaching social media campaign.

“At far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views,” explains the report.

Universities named in the report include UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among others. These schools allowed woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views.

Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill defended a blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian literature festival on campus, claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission” but persecuted conservative law professor Amy Wax for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.

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