#tentifada

[adhdnojutsu]

Louder for the people in the back:

The main "pro Palestine" student organization was already investigated under the Biden administration and found to be partially funded by Hamas. Now there's ironclad proof that student organizers had prior knowledge of the Oct 7th attacks and that instead of reporting it, they coordinated a planned propaganda campaign in support of it that began before the attacks even started.

This sure explains why the protests began immediately after the massacre rather than after Israel started its brutal payback. All participants should be tried and sentenced to the full extent of the law for their knowing and willing assistance in mass murder and terrorism.

It's just so hopeless. The main "pro Palestine" student organization was already investigated under the Biden administration and found to be partially funded by Hamas. Now there's ironclad proof that student organizers had prior knowledge of the Oct 7th attacks and that instead of reporting it, they coordinated a planned propaganda campaign in support of it that began before the attacks even started. And no one is going to give a shit. This should be headline news. It should have been headline news last year when the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability found they were being funded by Hamas. But it wasn't, and it won't be now either. I'd bet a good chunk of my savings that no non-Jewish news networks besides Fox News and the NY Post will pick this story up at all. Even those will just run it once before going back to their regularly scheduled programming about how immigrants are coming to eat your cats and dogs.

It's so fucking crazy. We have actual terrorist propaganda arms operating out of Ivy League universities, that are receiving funds from their parent terror organizations, that are being given prior knowledge of terrorist attacks in order to coordinate propaganda campaigns in support of them. And no one is doing anything about it. No one is even talking about it. The media coverage these university organizations recieve is entirely positive and sympathetic. No one ever mentions that they were already previously found to be receiving funds from Hamas and no one ever brings up how their own stated goals in their own words is the support of Hamas and the "total eradication of Western Civilization." The second any of these universities face any consequences for allowing their students to operate as actual terrorist collaborators, the entire planet freaks out and says the peaceful anti war protesters are being oppressed. What the fuck is going on right now. Sometimes I can't even fault gentiles for claiming we're all being hysterical and lying, because this is all so insane and hard to believe.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Yesterday was the anniversary of only one thing: the mass murder and rape of Jews. The demonstrations, therefore, fell into two categories: for and against. In the “for” category was one led by a familiar face: Nerdeen Kiswani, who took a break from trying to set Jews on fire to celebrate others who set Jews on fire. “Oct. 7 was a prison break and all the atrocity propaganda that we saw that came out of it was lies,” Kiswani sermonized, an imitation Father Coughlin for the Tik Tok generation.

The one confusing part of Kiswani’s rant was that she suggested the 1,200 innocent civilians “maybe” murdered on that day were killed by Israeli helicopters, which in Kiswani’s mind should make the IDF the good guys.

But Kiswani is bound to become coherent eventually, because she’ll have lots of practice. It’s clear she sees this as her calling, and the New York Times agrees. “Ms. Kiswani bills herself as part of a bolder, new generation of Palestinian American activists who are calling for what she says earlier generations also wanted, but feared to say in public: the replacement of the state of Israel with a state called Palestine, covering all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” the paper wrote in a flattering profile of the fair Lady Genocide.

The Times is just trying to be evenhanded. While on the one hand, it writes, Kiswani calls for the destruction of Mideast Jewry from the river to the sea, on the other, “Ms. Kiswani insists she is not antisemitic.” Well, OK, if she insists, I guess we have to take her at her word, the way the world took Hitler at his word he wouldn’t invade his neighbors.

Kiswani may have started Her Struggle on campus years ago, but her very professionalized caravan of mouth-frothing human Halloween displays left that all behind a long time ago. She’s an example of what coddled campus radicals turn into.

The Nazi Youth eventually grew up, too. So what happens when this generation of lost campus Jew-baiters grows up?

Even more than that, what will it take for them to hold the public’s attention? After all, we get acclimated to circumstances pretty quickly. Tent encampments designed to bar Jews from public spaces seemed pretty shocking a year ago. But Ivy League administrators ensured that it became normalized. It’s been nearly a year since Paul Kessler, a Jewish Californian, was killed by a pro-Palestinian protester not far from Los Angeles on a street corner. People seem to have gotten over that.

The tent isn’t the point of the tentifada. The point is the violence, the normalization of second-class citizenship for Jews, the loyalty oaths, the street mobs outside Jewish-owned restaurants smashing windows. It’s the evil energy that can’t be re-corked. How will American institutions inoculate themselves against what has been released into the air? Unless you’re focused on that, you’re still fighting the last war.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

In the 1930s, young Silvestre Frenk arrived in Mexico with his parents and siblings from Germany. His father, a Jewish physician, made the decision to flee the Nazis while the Frenks still had a chance to do so. “Had my grandparents made a different decision, had they decided to wait it out like so many other Jews in Europe, I would not be here today,” Silvestre’s son Julio once said. Julio is one of seven children. “That original family that was not wiped out in the Holocaust has produced a very large group of descendants,” he said back in 2015.

Julio Frenk followed in his father’s footsteps as a doctor and educator, eventually becoming Mexico’s secretary of health. He would go on to serve as the dean of Harvard’s public-health school and president of the University of Miami before taking over as UCLA chancellor last month. At his appointment, the Los Angeles Times worried that “Frenk has not dealt with the intense pro-Palestinian protests and counterprotests that have ignited violence, aggressive police actions, arrests and student disciplinary cases at UCLA and other campuses across the country.”

Yesterday Frenk dispelled such concerns. He announced that the university was suspending Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine. Last week, SJP-affiliated activists descended on the home of UCLA regent Jay Sures, the vice chairman of United Talent Agency, a major entertainment firm. The students surrounded the car of Sures’s wife, preventing her from leaving; vandalized Sures’s home; left signs with explicit death threats; and violated the city’s prohibition against protesting within 300 feet of a target’s private home.

Sures was targeted because he is Jewish and has been outspoken in defense of Jewish rights on campus and supported a UCLA resolution to institute political neutrality on university websites, a rule opposed by Hamas’s supporters on campus.

One of the strange aspects of the response to pro-Hamas mob harassment has been the tendency to excuse the actions of large groups when those same actions, if performed by a single person, would result in immediate legal intervention to protect the target. If a random person trapped Sures’s wife in her car, vandalized his house, and made unmistakable death threats against him in the process, this would be understood as the psychotic behavior of a dangerous and violent person. The fact that psychotic, violent behavior is practiced by large groups of people in support of a terrorist organization currently holding Americans hostage should be understood as an exponentially larger threat.

And it should also be understood as a monumental failing of any institution with which those lunatics are associated. Perhaps because of his family’s personal experience with SJP’s tactics as practiced nearly a century ago by the Nazis, Frenk took action immediately.

“I know that no one can promise a society free of violence,” Frenk said. “But as your chancellor, I can commit to you that whenever an act of violence is directed against any member of the university community, UCLA will not turn a blind eye. This is a responsibility I take most seriously.”

Unlike other university leaders, Frenk wasn’t fooled by protestations that physical violence is free speech. “At UCLA, there is always room for discourse and for passionate debate of different points of view,” he said.

In fact, there is no evidence that groups like SJP, which exist to shut down participation in public discourse, have any interest in speech and debate at all. Tentifada camps organized with the help of PFLP-affiliated officials and which instruct their participants not to respond to questions are manifestations of authoritarian tendencies that are employed in place of speech. This is not surprising: There is no serious or sane argument in favor of Hamas and Hezbollah, which these groups exist to support. Shutting down debate is the only plausible method of maintaining the illusion that they are involved in something useful or noble.

Violence and the threat of violence are the only recruiting tools these organizations have. Let’s not flatter them by pretending there is any coherent intellectual aspect to their activism whatsoever.

[cyarsk52-20]

Screw Hamas, screw Kanye, screw all these Tentifada terrorism supporters, and screw everybody that love them

[philosopherking1887]

To be clear, since this post has taken off: I am in favor of a ceasefire as soon as possible that's binding on both sides and includes the release of all the hostages (as well as wrongfully detained Gazan civilians, though I do not consider mistaken detention based on misplaced suspicions to be comparable to Hamas's cynical, premeditated taking of hostages). I am in favor of a lasting peace based on the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. To that end, I support progressive Israeli organizations like the New Israel Fund and Jewish-Palestinian partnerships like Standing Together, which are actually in a position to make meaningful changes in Israeli and Palestinian society and leadership that could make that peace a reality. A bunch of self-righteous, abstractly bloodthirsty American (and British, if you count the copycat encampments) Leftist college kids (and the occasional puerile professor who's sore that they weren't around in 1968) "LARPing the Revolution" (not my phrase, but it's brilliant) are doing fuck-all to help achieve real peace. If anything, they're making the situation worse by validating the maximalist demands of one side's extremists and hardening the extremists on the other side in their view that no peaceful compromise is possible and violence is the only way to handle the situation. For the love of God (or rather, humanity), help the Israeli Left by showing your support for the freedom and safety of both peoples; don't give ammunition to the Israeli Right by insisting that Palestinians and anyone who supports them should be satisfied with nothing less than the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion or death of millions of Jews.

If you have a problem with that from either the Left or the Right, feel free to piss up a rope :-)

Not gonna reply to the post in question, just gonna vagueblog, but: no, those kids in college encampments were not "protesting for peace"; they were protesting for the side they hate to unilaterally stand down, while cheering for unchecked indiscriminate violence by the side they think is righteous. Don't think I don't know what a "Ceasefire Now" sign means when it's right next to signs saying "Long Live [or Globalize] the Intifada," "We Are All Hamas," "Resistance By Any Means Necessary," etc., or banners with upside-down red triangles.

I even said that to an academic who gave an appalling talk at a conference justifying Hamas's violence: where do you get off calling yourself a "peace activist"? The only peace you want is the silence after an entire people has self-immolated.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Shafik never took anything resembling serious action against the students, and she left a Morningside Heights-sized mess for Armstrong to clean up. Trump’s victory in the presidential election changed the debate, but Jew-baiters still gathered in numbers and assaulted people, broke various property laws, and generally continued trampling on the idea that anyone in the Columbia or Barnard administrations was in charge. Armstrong, sensing that the federal government’s patience had run out, began doling out actual punishments for some of the more psychotic behavior of the Hamasniks, which at one point required the school to post security at Israel-related classes.

The punishments inspired more Hamasnik temper tantrums. Armstrong’s threats of disciplinary action were ignored. It was as if the Romanovs were standing at the windows of their Yekaterinburg prison house shouting orders at passersby.

And so the idea that faculty are “apoplectic” at Armstrong for “letting it get to this point,” is rich with irony. The only way to have prevented this loss of funding was to have instituted order on campus and shut down the junior PFLP camps. But when college administrators at Columbia and elsewhere called in law enforcement to do just that, faculty rebelled and essentially joined the opposition.

And this is an important point: The faculty at Columbia put the university in a situation in which there was no way for it to retain its funding unless the federal government decided to look the other way. The faculty are a not-insignificant reason Columbia is in this position in the first place. They arguably made it inevitable.

And not just at Columbia, either. Yesterday the Trump administration notified 60 other schools that they risked the same fate. The New York Times reports that it is quite a diverse group: “The list of five dozen schools included colleges from both Republican- and Democratic-voting states, elite Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale, state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, and smaller institutions, like Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which has about 2,000 students.”

The secretary of education is Linda McMahon, and she has moved fast. As the Times notes, four days after her confirmation hearing she had the department announce its prioritization of campus anti-Semitism. McMahon, like the rest of the Trump team, hit the ground running.

Indeed, the speed with which the new administration has taken action on numerous fronts has frequently caught the White House’s targets and the Democratic opposition completely off-guard.

And the higher-education landscape was already changing by the time Trump took office. As of today, 148 schools representing 2.6 million students have adopted policies of “institutional neutrality,” according to the Heterodox Academy. Rather than putting out institutional statements on every passing piece of news, schools officials have balked at such activism ever since the American intifada began. Officials were caught between not wanting to align their schools with Hamas and their fear of student anger at any acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist.

Fear, cowardice, whatever you want to call it, the universities have succumbed to it rather than stand up for their Jewish students. All those 148 schools adopted neutrality before Trump brought the hammer down on Columbia. Institutional neutrality, therefore, is only going to grow.

[greco-roman-jewess]

They’re honestly pretty lame as far as antigovernment protesters go

At my University

Apparently the tentifata isn’t quite over

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Amid the flurry of agitated headlines and stories about the Trump administration’s supposed crackdown on immigrants’ “pro-Palestinian speech,” the case of Momodou Taal is a cautionary tale.

Taal, a graduate student at Cornell, announced yesterday that he is giving up his legal fight to stay in the country. Taal’s case was probably the one with the biggest gap between the reporting and the reality, and his deportation holds an important lesson for those inclined to take anti-Zionist activists at their word.

The case against Taal was clear-cut, and Taal’s legal challenge was cynical, dishonest, and frivolous. Moreover, Taal sought not only to keep his visa but to legally cancel much or all of Trump’s executive order combating anti-Semitism. Even if successful, Taal’s challenge to the order would not have changed immigration law. So it was merely a gratuitous attempt to unravel the civil rights of Jews on campus. And yet, he was painted in a sympathetic light by journalists and activists whose aims aligned with Taal’s.

Let’s start at the beginning. In the spring of 2024, students constructed a Hamas-inspired tent encampment on a disallowed quad. They had deliberately misled the school by “indicat[ing] there would not be any tents” in their protest. Despite their dishonesty, the tentifada activists were offered another area in which to set up their anti-Israel protest tents. They refused the offer.

Momodou Taal was among the leaders of the group. He and the others were warned that if they did not move their tentifada to the approved area, students would be subject to disciplinary action including suspension. Taal was therefore suspended.

None of this so far reflects well on Taal or poorly on Cornell. But Taal was on a student visa, which meant this suspension was a warning he’d have to take seriously: another suspension would almost certainly mean the revocation of his visa.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

Even as some universities are finally cracking down on the groups behind the explosion of campus anti-Semitism, the fact that it has taken them so long to do so is a reminder of the damage that’s been done.

Yesterday brought two connected revelations: First, George Washington University will suspend Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) this academic year. Second, Maher Bitar is considered a leading candidate to be the director of national intelligence in a potential Kamala Harris administration.

SJP, reports Jewish Insider, will be “prohibited from hosting on-campus events and lose all university funding.” It wasn’t immediately clear which rules the group broke, but it would probably be easier to ask what rules, if any, the group has followed. The move comes in the wake of what may prove to be a game-changing ruling from a federal judge who scolded UCLA for allowing and abetting the violation of Jewish students’ civil rights, mainly through the tentifada protest camps that sought to prohibit Jewish students from accessing communal buildings and classrooms.

For years, groups like SJP have been building a movement to push Jews from the public square. Given Kamala Harris’s polling surge, that movement is on the verge of unprecedented representation in a presidential administration.

One example, and a very important one at that, is Maher Bitar, “who ascended from Adam Schiff’s legal advisor to senior director of intelligence on the N.S.C. to, most recently, the N.S.C.’s chief coordinator for intelligence and defense policy,” Julia Ioffe notes in Puck, adding: “Could he be offered the D.N.I. job or some kind of senior role in the I.C. under Harris? Very likely.”

[gaia-aviva]

To be Jewish has meant experiencing a crushing disappointment in the world since the Hamas attacks that started this war. A stray line in one of the many articles about the Bibas family today unintentionally offers a crystal clear explanation for that disappointment. “For many Israelis,” the New York Times writes, “the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.

The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. Yes, we should be ashamed of our fellow Americans, who not only won’t mention the Bibas family but won’t even learn the name of a single American hostage held in Gaza throughout the war.

At last year’s Oscars, a line of “pro-Palestine” stars—Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Ava DuVernay and others—wore a pin of a red right hand that is meant to valorize the murderers of Jews. In a just world, all these celebrities would instead be using their time on the red carpet to do anything, anything at all, other than express public sympathy for the Bibas children’s kidnappers.

It shouldn’t be only Jews who see Kfir Bibas’s smiling face and bright red hair when they close their eyes. In that famous picture of baby Bibas, he is holding a small pink stuffed elephant. Kfir’s relatives spent over a year searching the rubble of Nir Oz, where the family lived, for that pink elephant. It turned up, finally, in January, in what his aunt hoped would be a “good sign.”

As the “pro-Palestinian” mobs filled the streets of every major city to celebrate Hamas’s slaughter, Jews around the world looked at them dumbfounded; they kidnapped a baby. How much does one have to hate Jews to side with the monsters who kidnap babies? A lot, is the answer—an unpleasant realization Jews came to over the past 16 months.

Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed. Members of Congress giddily attended tentifada demonstrations that were no longer simply “pro-Palestine” or “anticolonial”; they were about defending those who stole Kfir from his home and dragged him to Gaza where, according to Hamas, he died. And it is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer the people who kidnapped a baby.

Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence. Kfir is the dividing line. In a better world, there’d be no one standing on the wrong side of it.

Yarden Bibas was released this month by Hamas after nearly 500 days in captivity, and the terror group is claiming it will soon deliver the bodies of his wife, Shiri, and two sons, Ariel and Kfir. Ariel was four when he was taken on Oct. 7, 2023, and Kfir was nine months old.