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Young Jews Brace for ‘A Day of Global Jihad’ Maya Sulkin
I was a deeply unpopular student at Columbia for a simple reason: I was a Zionist. When I posted photos on Instagram of swastikas graffitied across campus, I received private messages telling me I was “attention-seeking.” When I hosted pro-Israel events, commenters online accused me of blood libel.
I left Columbia earlier this year in part because of this bullying. And now, after more than 1,300 Jews were slaughtered by Hamas in Israel, the hatred that once hid behind my Instagram DMs is appearing in broad daylight right at my alma mater, an Ivy League bastion that has educated politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners.
On Wednesday, female Columbia student Maxwell Friedman, 19, was arrested and charged with assault after she beat an Israeli student with a stick outside the school’s main library.
The following day, hundreds of students gathered outside Columbia’s Alma Mater statue to cheer on the mass genocide of Jews. (In this, they were merely echoing the views published by tenured professor Joseph Massad, who described the scene of “Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence” as “awesome.”)
For hours, students encircled the quad, waving Palestinian flags and chanting the ten rally cries sanctioned by on-campus activists, including “End the Zionist occupation” and “Stop defending apartheid.”
Many covered their faces, pulling sweatshirts over their heads in the face of cameras. A few wore N95 masks, sunglasses, and hats all at once. Earlier, one of the student groups behind the event, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, encouraged participants to cover their faces “for safety from doxxing.”
A counterprotest of Jewish students stood mostly silent except for one point, when they sang in Hebrew. Later, as they poured out of the front gate on Broadway, some walked with their heads hung low, their eyes averted.
“Something has changed,” Sophie Kesson, an 18-year-old Jewish student at Columbia, told The Free Press.
This weekend, she says, is parents’ weekend. She had been looking forward to bringing her mother to a Shabbat service at the university’s Hillel, a community for Jews on campus.
But former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal has called for a day of global jihad on Friday, and the group’s commander Mahmoud al-Zahar said “the entire planet will be under our law; there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors.”
Given the threats, she might just stay inside.
“My parents have warned me plenty of times that this isn’t really the safest place to be Jewish,” she says of the campus, which she says has “a very big pro-Palestine movement,” endorsed by many professors.
She pauses, fumbling to grab her necklace: “And now with all of this happening, they’re increasingly worried. And so am I.”
To be clear, this is not just a Columbia problem.
On Tuesday, at Drexel University in Philadelphia, a Jewish student’s dorm room was set on fire. No other door in the hall was vandalized, and the student believes she was targeted due to her outspoken support of Israel. Police are now investigating this as a possible hate crime.
At Stanford on Wednesday, the Students for Justice in Palestine hosted a “teach-in” attended by about 250 people, where a source told The Free Press that a student speaker advised the crowd that the Israeli government’s “goal is to kill all Palestinians.”
On Thursday at Stanford it was reported that an instructor divided his students at a mandatory undergraduate course called “Civil, Liberal and Global Education” into two camps: Jews and non-Jews. The teacher told the Jewish students to gather their things, stand in a corner, and said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” The teacher then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student said, “Six million,” the teacher replied, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.” In a public statement, Stanford revealed multiple students had reported this conduct, and it was now investigating “identity-based targeting of students.”
Also on Thursday, George Mason University in Virginia students waved Palestinian flags and chanted “glory to the resistance fighters.”
At UCLA, many hundreds of students gathered to chant: “intifada, intifada”—a call for an violent uprising against Israel.
At the University of Washington, a crowd of Students for Justice in Palestine filled the air with chants of “There is only one solution” as a Jewish student cried and begged a guard, “They want us dead. How are you allowing this?” Olivia Feldman, the 20-year-old co-president of Students Supporting Israel at the college, told The Free Press, “I’ve been called a terrorist and a colonizer. I’ve been called a baby killer in the past. A lot of students are really afraid to go to class tomorrow.”
On Thursday, a Fox News reporter said that at least three protesters at the University of Massachusetts Amherst followed her into a parking garage, demanding to know her ethnicity, address, and phone number. When she refused, one of the protesters told her “I’ll have my lawyers contact you” and “have a terrible day.” (One of our reporters was denied an interview at a rally earlier this week because she was not Arab.)
It’s happening off campuses, too. Jewish people across the West—from London and Paris to New York and Sydney—are seeing the creeping telltale signs of hate.
The NYPD has been ordered to be out in force and in uniform all day Friday, amid fears of violence. Religious centers have been told to ensure all their doors are locked and guards remain on high alert. Jewish day schools across the city are ratcheting up security. Jews aren’t the only ones suffering from violence; three Palestinian supporters were reportedly attacked by a group waving Israeli flags on Wednesday night.
In Toronto, three men were arrested for making threats to the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. Authorities are now investigating the incident as a hate crime.
In Paris, after the government banned pro-Palestinian protests out of fear of civil unrest, several hundred still showed up in the downtown area chanting “Israel murderer.” Riot police eventually disbanded the crowd using tear gas.
In front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia Tuesday night, over one thousand protestors demanded “gas the Jews.” A group of men attended another rally in Melbourne that night, where they reportedly said they were “on the hunt to kill Jews.”
In London, women in hijabs were seen ripping down posters of Israeli hostages from buildings in the streets and scurrying away. At least three Jewish schools—Ateres Beis Yaakov Primary School, Torah Vodaas Primary School, and Menorah High School—are closed until Monday as a precautionary measure.
Alexis Price told The Free Press that her childrens’ Jewish day school in north London is trying to stay open while amping up security. Normally, the school has two guards and a fence. On Friday, they are beefing up with two police officers and three community volunteer guards.
“It’s going to look like a prison,” said the 40-year-old mother of two kids, aged nine and five.
Price said boys have been told not to wear their kippahs on their way to school. She added that she knows families who’ve pulled their kids from class all week to keep them safe.
“I discussed it with my husband because I am scared, but we decided to send the kids because what sort of message would we be sending them if we didn’t?” Price said. “We don’t want to let the terrorists win.”
Aliza Licht, a 49-year-old entrepreneur and author based in New York City, told The Free Press that while her inbox and social media feeds have been filled with fear, her local community has inspired her with their strength.
“We know that if we support each other, we will get past this,” Licht said.
On Friday, she is sending her daughter to school and later that night, she will join a group of New Yorkers who are planning to lean out of their windows or head to their rooftops and sing the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem.
“My grandparents did not survive the Holocaust for me to be silent,” she said.
Free Press staffers Olivia Reingold, Francesca Block, and Julia Steinberg and London-based freelance writer Nicole Lambert contributed reporting to this piece. Read Bari’s column Campus Cowardice and Where the Buck Stops.
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November 11, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
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Notes:
https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/
https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration
https://www.politico.com/playbook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/
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The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One Santi Ruiz
In a few short weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president. His transition team will be in charge of a federal government that, in many rudimentary ways, doesn’t work.
Let’s leave aside partisan gridlock in Congress and turmoil in the judicial branch, and just focus on the executive branch: National Public Data, which aggregates personal information for background checks, was hacked this year, meaning your Social Security number is now floating around on the internet. The IRS is built on mainframes from 1965 and relies on code from JFK’s administration that no one’s learning anymore. The pandemic highlighted our broken systems: In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned private companies from rolling out their own Covid tests because the CDC was developing their own. But the CDC tests turned out to be defective, leaving the U.S. flying blind until private companies could rush in and pick up the slack.
For the past year, I’ve run an interview series called Statecraft where I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made. These men and women serve in a variety of roles, such as running a CIA base in Afghanistan, investigating Soviet anthrax leaks, and redesigning Department of Labor job centers. The best of them have managed to deliver good outcomes for the American people by working around the worst ingrained practices of the federal bureaucracy, and they have lessons for reformers eager to make the federal government go.
But changing the culture of a machine this size takes time. Despite the fact he will have a Republican House and Senate, and the allyship of Elon Musk, who seems eager to head his own Department of Government Efficiency, Trump faces the same broken federal machinery—and will face many of the same problems, and the shot clock to solve them—that Biden did.
To help make the government more efficient and effective instantly, the Trump team should prioritize the following:
Hire Bureaucrats, Just Make Them the Right Ones
Progressives fear Trump’s vision for civil service reform, Schedule F, which would reclassify many civil servants to make them easier to fire. They worry Schedule F would gut executive branch agencies—which includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, State, Justice, et al.—of their talent, and consolidate power in the White House.
But even liberals like Jen Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer of America under President Obama, have pointed out that “managing out” a poor performer can be a full-time job for political appointees. Firing an executive branch civil servant requires extensive documentation. Additionally, many employees are unionized, and all can appeal their firings internally. Partially as a result, the government cans bad employees about four times less often than the private sector does. It takes a lot more than saying “you’re fired” to get people out the door.
It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in. Or take the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been screening prospective air traffic controllers for how many sports they played in high school in an effort to meet its racial quotas.
A strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. It could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows academics to contribute part-time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management can and should encourage more aggressive use of Direct Hire Authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process.
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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion? Frannie Block
A group of alumni and former professors of Columbia University warn in a new report that the university could stand to lose up to $3.5 billion a year—or up to 55 percent of the university’s annual operating budget—if Columbia doesn’t start enforcing its rules and cracking down on campus rule-breaking.
The report, published by Stand Columbia Society, a “politically neutral” collective working to restore Columbia’s “rightful pre-eminence in American—and global—higher education,” states the potential financial risks to the university are rooted in Trump and other Republican officials’ “enmity for elite institutions in general, and our alma mater in particular.”
Alexandra Zubko, a 1999 graduate of Columbia and member of Stand Columbia, told The Free Press that the group published the Institutional Risk Exposure report because “we don’t want Columbia to be made an example of.”
The report estimates what might happen if the incoming Trump administration were to accuse universities like Columbia of violating Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of “race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” which would allow the administration to withhold federal funding.
At present, Columbia has at least three active Title VI investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. Since October 7, 2023, Columbia’s campus has been embroiled in chaotic demonstrations against the State of Israel, prompting the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to conclude in a recent report that the university was “the site of some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country.”
Put another way, Stand Columbia Society predicts that Republicans may force “an uncomfortable reckoning that we can no longer wish away.” That reckoning—which Stand Columbia believes is possible, if not probable—could potentially cost the university up to $1.33 billion in government grants and contracts that it currently receives, including around $800 million dedicated solely for research.
And it’s not only federal grants that the university could lose if it is found in violation of Title VI.
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