The following was posted this morning by SAFE, the UMich SJP, this morning.
Note that the student was sent to jail for 4 days for violating a court order to stay off campus except for classes, which he did not do. He was the only one of the 11 people charged with this order to violate it. He was specifically only given 4 days because graduation is May 3rd and the judge felt that forbidding him from attending graduation was cruel to his parents.
With the classic red triangle in support of the Al Qassam Brigades (US and EU designated terrorist org).
If you have a chance to read this article please do because it is worth reading. It is very insightful in terms of giving insight as to how thinking and tactics of the anti-zionist and pro-Palestine folks and their leaders.
Much of the conversation about Israel's war in Gaza happens in silos. THR asked if pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig and 'The Encampments' di
I have SO MUCH RESPECT for Hen Mazzig for taking this on and putting up with this anti-Israel “activist” and his antisemitic bullshit. Hen was presented with so many absolutely horrendous and blatantly untrue claims about Israel, Palestine, the rise of antisemitism, the nature of antizionism, and the anti-Israel protests on American college campuses, and he responded to them all with grace and patience and knowledge.
In general, you don’t really see a ton of talk on here about Gaza anymore besides the casual antisemitism and people viciously defending insultingly obvious scam fundraisers. I think it’s because they’re too morally bankrupt to acknowledge the situation did, in fact, get worse after Donald “occupy Gaza” Trump won and took away all pressure Biden was putting on Netanyahu, but they can’t actually admit that their interest in Gaza started and ended with ratfucking Democrats, so they reblog scams to make it look like they care lol
University's president apologizes as task force urges reforms to admissions, curriculum, research and bias training; 'being Jewish was large
Harvard University on Tuesday released its long-awaited internal report on campus antisemitism, depicting a hostile atmosphere toward Jews and Israelis before and after the October 2023 invasion of Israel.
The report came amid heavy pressure on the university from the Trump administration and outlines a series of recommendations the university should take to remedy the campus environment.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community,” Harvard’s interim president Alan Garbar said in a statement.
Jewish students, and especially Israelis, were often subject to harassment, social shunning and bullying, the report said.
The 311-page document opens with an anecdote that, the authors said, reflected many of the campus tensions. A Jewish student speaker at a conference had planned to tell the story of his Holocaust survivor grandfather finding refuge in Israel. Organizers told the student the story was not “tasteful” and laughed at him when he expressed his confusion. The story would have been seen as a way to “justify oppression,” the authors said.
“Perhaps the best way to describe the existence of many Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard in the 2023-24 academic year is that their presence had become triggering, or the subject of political controversy,” the report said, adding that Jews had landed “on the wrong side of a political binary that provided no room for the complexity of history or current politics.”
“No other group was constantly told that their history was a sham, that they or their co-religionists or coethnics were supremacists and oppressors, and that they had no right to the protections offered by antibias norms,” the report said.
The campus atmosphere caused Jews to hide their identities, turn down admission offers, leave academia, and withdraw from campus life. Friend groups broke apart and students pressured their peers to stop speaking with Israelis, solely due to their identity. Jews were implicated in atrocities due to their perceived “hereditary and collective guilt,” the report said.
In some of the incidents described in the report, student groups disseminated a cartoon that showed a hand marked with a Star of David holding nooses around the necks of a Black man and an Arab man. Commencement speaker Maria Ressa delivered off-the-cuff remarks that “appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” Another graduation speaker blamed Israel for genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Students sometimes walked away from Israelis mid-conversation when they found out they came from Israel, including Israeli Muslims and Christians. Other Jews were pressured to prove they were “one of the good ones” by condemning Israel. Jews were told they were privileged oppressors and hostage posters were defaced with antisemitic slogans. Israelis were pushed out of student clubs.
The controversy at Harvard erupted as the Hamas attack on Israel was still underway. Thirty-three Harvard student groups blamed Israel for the invasion. The task force said the letter caught Jewish students and faculty “in a moment of intense vulnerability and grief” and “appeared to be blaming the victims, whose blood was not yet dry, for their own deaths.”
Harvard saw 70 days of protest in the 2023-24 academic year, more than any peer institution, besides Stanford, the report said.
The report said 39% of Jewish students felt not at home on campus, 26% felt physically unsafe, 44% felt mentally unsafe, and 49% felt unsupported in their well-being, and 73% were uncomfortable expressing political opinions. Nearly 60% reported experiencing discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias.
“Before October 7th, being Jewish was largely irrelevant. It was not a barrier. I was proud to be Jewish,” one student said. “After October 7th, I experienced the following in this order: first there was pressure, then there was chaos, then hostility, and in certain spaces, the normalization of subtle discrimination.”
“The anti-normalization idea is that Jews on campus with ties to Israel must be anti-Zionist to be welcomed. I’ve lost friends who abandoned me,” another student said.
The report said on campus relations had deteriorated in recent years. In the 1980s and 1990s, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students held joint events, despite disagreements. Up until 2017, a Palestinian activist attended dinners at Harvard Hillel during a “different era in intergroup relations.” The Jewish student population is also much smaller than in the past, and discussions around the conflict have become “much more extreme,” the report said.
Anti-Israel activists became more aggressive as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed and activism pivoted toward building awareness for Palestinians, instead of collaboration. The tactics changed, too, as the activists worked to leverage academic groups against Israel, and inject the Palestinian cause “wherever possible,” such as lifecycle events and unrelated courses, and use disruptive tactics.
The protests are built on an ideological framework that sees Israel as an illegitimate settler-colony that can be destroyed. The activists target Western support for Israel, aiming to undermine the belief that Jews have a historical connection to the territory, the view that Israel is a democracy, and weaken the “post-Holocaust social prohibition on antisemitism,” the report said. Student activists protested against antisemitism training, for example.
The result is “totalizing rhetoric” that paints Israelis as “abstract figures intent on genocide.”
To compile the report, investigators met with hundreds of students, faculty and staff, as well as alumni, including non-Jews and Jews, and reviewed written documentation.
The university also released a 222-page report on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias. The reports depicted a wide gulf between the two sides, with Muslims complaining that Harvard had shut down an anti-Israel protest encampment that Jews said had subjected them to harassment. Pro-Palestinian students were subject to doxxing by off-campus groups, and said they felt “abandoned and silenced.” The antisemitism report noted, however, that pro-Palestinian rhetoric was widespread on campus, despite the perceived suppression.
Anti-Zionist Jews also reported hostility primarily from other Jewish students.
Harvard released the reports on Tuesday while the university simultaneously battles the Trump administration over demands to limit campus activism — reforms the government says are necessary to root out campus antisemitism. The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding and Harvard responded with a lawsuit in a clash that is being watched closely across higher education.
The report included recommendations for remedying the campus atmosphere. Recommendations included changes in admissions and student life; providing academic offerings on Jewish life, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Israel; monitoring student organizations; and implementing new complaint mechanisms.
In a list of “actions and commitments,” Harvard said it will review admissions processes to make sure applicants are evaluated based on their ability to “engage constructively with different perspectives, show empathy and participate in civil discourse.”
It pointed to a recently added application question asking students about a time they strongly disagreed with someone. The antisemitism task force called for that kind of questioning, saying Harvard should reject anyone with a history of bias and look unfavorably on “exhibitions of hostility, derision or dismissiveness.”
Still, it appears to fall short of the Trump administration’s demands around admissions, which called on Harvard to end all preferences “based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof” and implement “merit-based” policies by August. The Supreme Court has rejected the use of race in college admissions, but many colleges look at factors including students’ family income and geography to bring a diverse class to campus.
Responding to complaints that Harvard’s instruction had become too politicized and anti-Israel, the university said it will work to hold professors to new standards of “excellence.” Deans will make sure faculty promote intellectual openness and refrain from endorsing political positions “that may cause students to feel pressure to demonstrate allegiance,” the university said.
Courses and curriculum will also be reviewed to reflect those standards.
Other changes include required antisemitism training for students and staff, along with expanded academic offerings on Hebrew, Judaic, Arab and Islamic studies. Harvard will put money toward a research project on antisemitism along with a historical overview on Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians at the university.
"Other changes include required antisemitism training for students and staff, along with expanded academic offerings on Hebrew, Judaic, Arab and Islamic studies. Harvard will put money toward a research project on antisemitism along with a historical overview on Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians at the university."
Unless those courses and projects are about the history of Islamic and Arab antisemitism and correcting the lies about Palestinian history in the anti-Zionist movement, Harvard can fuck right off.
You can really see how they don't consider antisemitism to be "real", and, as the comment bitterly goes, "antisemitism is the one prejudice that needs a chaperone in order to be discussed."
My autobio collection We Are Here (And Other Queer Comics) is available to download in full on my kofi! That’s right folks! You can buy the harrowing confessions of my soul for just $5!!!
Huge thanks to my professor Jeremy Bushnell for being my advisor on this project, and for the many friends who supported me along my journey 💓🏳️🌈 I love you all you’re very cool
also pls don’t feel too bad for me in the comments abt this comic… i have an amazing lesbian girlfriend LMAO
again, to be clear, this is not an endorsement of radicalism or extremist violence from settlers, but it is a fair question, and, hauntingly, it’s one that could be asked about many cities other than Hebron (as Jews scattered across the diaspora were also massacred or expelled and now cannot return to places they called home for centuries). Hebron bears a particular distinction for this due to its location and ancestral history.
why exactly are there places where it’s not safe for Jews to travel freely, much less to live?
if you believe that a brutal pogrom driving out an ancient community means those people should never be allowed to safely live there again, don’t pretend to have principles about a decolonial mindset.
Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-S
Hebron Massacre of 1929 - Jewish Knowledge Base
Israeli historian Hillel Cohen makes a strong argument that, in fact, 1929 was the genesis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was the year t
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. For journalist Yardena Schwartz, the massacre was a chi
The 1929 Hebron massacre perpetrated by followers of Haj Amin Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, demonstrates the deep roots of Islamist ideo
Yardena Schwartz's new book explores the 1929 Hebron massacre and its lasting impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing parallels
This story originally appeared 10 years ago. It is being republished now to mark the events that occurred 90 years ago this week in the city
something striking in this piece from 2009:
one wonders what would happen—what would be the reaction—were such an attack to be perpetrated against the Jews of Hebron today.
we don’t have to wonder anymore, because of 10/7 - the Jews in the kibbutzim, who were peaceniks, should, by whatever twisted metric is put forth here, be seen as the innocent civilians they were/are, in their own country. the Jews of Hebron exist much more controversially by that same metric. but the residents of the kibbutzim have been smeared as occupiers and genociders regardless, their deaths cheered and justified, so if Hebron were to happen now…we know what the fervent response would be.
Back in 1929 the Jews who called themselves “settlers” were the relatively secular Zionists who lived on the Mediterranean coast and in northern Eretz Israel. The Jews of Hebron had dwelled there intermittently for thousands of years and continuously since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. In the 1920s there was an influx of young scholars from a Lithuanian yeshiva, Knessett Israel. Their arrival coincided with rising tensions throughout Palestine. By August, trouble was sensed by the one British police officer in the town, Raymond Cafferata. He was told by both Arabs and Jews in Hebron that “any trouble” was “out of the question.”
Yet that same week a Jewish teacher named Haim Bagayo was warned, “This time we are going to butcher you all.” Earlier that day, there had been clashes in Jerusalem, in which three Arabs and three Jews died. The Jews of Hebron, Auerbach writes, “refused to believe that their Arab neighbors, with whom they had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence for four centuries, meant them harm.” Cafferata noted that in Hebron “everything appeared normal.” But before the day was out, Arabs began to attack Jews with clubs, and Jewish shops were quickly shuttered.
(graphic descriptions of the massacre follow in the article)
[…] In the years after the establishment of the Jewish state, when Jordan ruled Hebron, the vestiges of Jewish presence were obliterated. The ruins of the Avraham Avinu synagogue were razed and its site given over to an animal pen. Houses of Jewish learning were converted to Arab schools. The ancient Jewish cemetery was torn up.
A brutal massacre nearly a century ago in Judaism’s second-holiest city makes clear that murderous Palestinian rage against Jews has little
One of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, composed of some 800 people before the massacre, was decimated, along with centuries of coexistence that had made Hebron a model of peace between Jews and Muslims. In the aftermath of the attack, the British authorities that ruled Palestine forced the Jews of Hebron to evacuate, turning them into refugees.
Jews had lived in Hebron since biblical times, their lives centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are believed to be buried. Much like the Jews who were killed on Oct. 7 were not settlers, the Jews killed in Hebron in 1929 were not Zionists. They did not need to be. They just needed to be Jewish.
(water filter is for the message, not Geordie’s response). anon is an idiot, acting in bad faith, or both, and it’s angering that they lash out so much at allies to the Jewish community.
the seething “don’t you dare say you care for humanity” feels ironic considering I’d wager anon doesn’t have a problem with the horrific violence on Jews being discussed here.
if you are too willfully ignorant to understand this, here’s a clarification: settler violence in the West Bank is disgusting and reprehensible. it’s every bit as condemnable as the violence enacted by Islamist terror groups. both are culpable in exacerbating tensions and conflict.
no, this is not support for them. no, this is not support for extreme fundamentalists. no, this is not in favor of annexation. no, this is not scheming (((Zionist))) behavior. this is addressing historical incidents. ask yourself why you have such an angry response to history.
if you’re this reactionary and read everything in bad faith, you shouldn’t be speaking about this at all, and your entire position is most likely filtered through a prism of antisemitism.
it should not be a requirement to have to say any of this. it should not be demanded of us to provide disclaimers and caveats every time we discuss history, especially when it pertains to devastating, traumatic events like massacres.
but isn’t it interesting how Jews are never allowed to address anything that’s been done to our people without being accused of “playing the victim” or of evil motivations? can’t talk about the Holocaust and how its primary motivation was to exterminate the Jewish people, can’t talk about MENA expulsions, can’t talk about pogroms - even in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, without it somehow being (((Zionist))) villainy.
if you guys dont know anything about canadian politics, i dont think you realize how insane this liberal victory is.
just months ago, the conservatives had an almost guaranteed win. Trudeau was insanely unpopular even among his own party, the progressive vote was split between them and the NDP, and the conservatives had gained so much more ground with the up-and-comer poilievre who came in with a canadian trump campaign strategy. We were resigned to losing, canadian minorities were making backup plans for their livelihoods in the likely event that we would be targeted by poilievre and his goons. His victory seemed like a sad inevitability that we could only stand up for so long against
And then trump was elected. and then canadians woke the fuck up from their conservative pipe dreams as we were hit with tariffs and annexation threats. and then trudeau resigned, leaving his bad blood behind. and then the NDP nuked themselves by publicly betraying the minorities they claimed to serve with their "we dont care who you vote for as long as they arent liberal" strategy, ending the split progressive vote as they were left behind. and then Mark Carney, the best possible liberal leader for this moment in time to win as many people over as possible, was elected liberal leader. Not all of these things are good, many are terrible, many are complicated, but politics is incredibly complicated, and it's the system we work on, so it's the hand we have to play.
And it was close tonight. It was uncomfortably, nauseatingly close, even with all these factors at play, even with ridings in the prariries of all regions going red, because that's how guaranteed a conservative win seemed not too long ago.
But they didn't win. We won.
I want us all to take this moment in time and think back on it when it all seems hopeless and like it'll never be right again. An anti-doomerism moment if you will. Because he was going to win, that wasn't a question, he WAS going to win. And then he didn't.
Just an additional note to this very excellent post, but not only did he not win - he lost the personal seat he’s been holding since 2004. The situation tanked so badly for the Conservatives that the unthinkable happened.
Just to visualise the insane shift in Canadian voter sympathies, look at what happens in mid January 2025 in this graph (opinion polling during the pre-campaign period) :
Speaking of shipping, do you think there is a way for Shyvanna/Jarven to ever work out in a healthy manner?
Absolutely not - that's why it's compelling.
There is literally no version of that relationship that isn't going to be absolutely boiling in unspoken resentment, internalized guilt, shame, and desperate desire for redemption through the Other.
Like, however their relationship resolves, they are both going to bleed a lot before they get there. Very fertile grounds for angst and pain.
Exactly, Shyvanna/Jarvan should be unhealthy and toxic and messed up and tangled up with Demacian politics and culture and traditions and taboo in fifty different ways. Add to that the fact that Shyvanna straight up isn't a human being, they could do so much with how alien her way of feeling or expressing emotions could be (no idea if they have done that in canon short stories, just spit balling).
Or, at the very least, it should start off that way and be explored through the length of whatever narrative project Riot may put them in.
"Monarch of a nation that hates and persecutes magic/inherently magical creature" is my shit, it's the shit of so many of us. It's a tragedy that there isn't more canon or fanon content about those two.
I mean, I very much want the Liberals to win by a landslide.
They are still 4 seats short of having a majority government, and while it's 100% possible that they will get those 4, it's equally likely that they will have to sit down with BQ after the election (which isn't crazy or bad, BQ has long enjoyed that kind of leverage, and they are social democrats after all).
I think this goes to show how polling can warp people's expectations (some projected that the Liberals could get as much as 190). And it's also a sign that Canada's sizable conservative population isn't exactly going to stay silent about this.
Sure, they aren't going to be as insane or powerful as the Republicans were during the Biden administration, but that's a low bar to clear.
more antihamas protests led by tens of thousands with women, children, men & the elderly. not only are they risking their lives in this not only because of hamas but because of the israeli military, calling for hamas to go, for the blockade to be lifted so humanitarian aid can come in, for the famine & collective punishment to stop & the basic human right to live in peace. palestinians are incredibly brave. indigenous solidarity from turtle island!
Ok either it’s really late for me and I’m starting to see things and should probably go to bed, or I think the survey link included in the article was updated to show April 9-10 results. Those results now show that 51% of voters age 18-24 lean more towards supporting Hamas. Kind of inexplicably, the number of voters age 18-24 who believe that Hamas should release the hostages without any conditions or otherwise face serious consequences has stayed the same at 65% in favor of that. Not sure how that circle has been squared.
Here’s the picture included in the article with the March results:
Reminder, analytical AI and generative AI aren't the same. While I loathe generative AI and feel there is no ethical way to use it at this time, analytical AI can serve valuable purposes in many fields.
This exact development--the breast cancer detection--found my mother's breast cancer in what they're now calling Stage Zero. Because they caught it so early. She's already treated and clean.
