Harvard agrees to discuss divestment from ‘Israel’ following protests

Al Mayadeen | May 15, 2024

After Harvard agreed to discuss student concerns on the university’s endowment concerning “Israel”, protesters against the Israeli war on Gaza took down their tents in the university yard on May 14.

Harvard oversees the biggest academic endowment in the world, amounting to around $50 billion, and invests part of it in funds and companies, some of which are linked to “Israel”.

In a statement on Instagram, the student protest group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP coalition) said that after surviving beyond the student move-out, the encampment has come to an end, however, “the struggle for Palestinian liberation goes on.”

They added that they built the “Liberated Zone in Harvard Yard as a model of the world we want to see: one that proudly affirms Palestinian liberation rather than elimination.”

The students highlighted how every day they sustained their encampment, their organizing capacity was strengthened, adding that they forced the “question of Palestine on an institution that has historically refused it.”

HOOP: Harvard turned Yard into ‘surveillance state’

HOOP went on to describe how Harvard attempted to quietly “choke” them out from closing its gates to the public, to even turning Harvard Yard into a “surveillance state.”

According to the students, a pre-condition of the decamping is that the administration would take back student suspensions, adding that it has also offered them meetings regarding disclosure and divestment with members of the Harvard Management Company, alongside talks about the launch of a Center for Palestine Studies at Harvard.

HOOP emphasized that they are “under no illusions,” as they know that these meetings are not divestment wins but are rather attempts to “pacify” them from full disclosure and divestment, however, that will not work.

They ended their statement by saying “Harvard beware: the Liberated Zone is everywhere.”

Harvard University Interim President Alan Garber agreed to meet with the students and answer their questions.

Protests in support of Gaza are ongoing 

The director of Al Mayadeen‘s office in Geneva reported that student protests at Swiss universities are still taking place in support of Gaza and condemnation of Israeli crimes.

In addition, Herald Square in New York City has witnessed a massive demonstration in support of Palestine.

 

Harvard Law student gov. urged university to divest from ‘Israel’

The Harvard Law School (HLS) Student Government passed a resolution on March 29 urging the university to completely divest from any organization that supports the Israeli war on Gaza.

The measure urged the Harvard Management Company (HMC), which manages the school’s $50 billion endowment, “to divest completely from weapons manufacturers, firms, academic programs, corporations, and all other institutions that aid the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians.”

The HLS Student Government alludes to Harvard’s commitment of nearly $200 million in businesses linked to the Israeli occupation military and illegal settlements in Palestine, similar to HMC’s prior divestment from South African apartheid and the tobacco industry in 1990.

The resolution’s author, Swap Agrawal, expressed that some Palestinian students at the school have “lost dozens of family members in the ongoing genocide,” noting that students reported feeling strongly that it was “necessary to put pressure on things to change.”

He added that students are deeply concerned that money held in trust may be funding this genocide, emphasizing that the resolution was affected by the International Court of Justice’s statement in January, which found it “plausible” that “Israel” had violated the Genocide Convention.

After the resolution vote, which had 12 supporters, four opponents, and three abstentions, two board members resigned, stating that they did so because they “strongly disagree” with it.

Unremarkable peer recruited by Zionist lobby to stop Palestine Action

By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | May 13, 2024

I have written many times about the heroic activities of Palestine Action, the protest group which burst onto the scene around four years ago using a blend of unrivalled direct action, anarchy and good, old-fashioned peaceful resistance to disrupt and wreck Israel’s war machine factories in the UK.

Despite numerous arrests, very few PA members have been prosecuted successfully, largely because the arms dealers they target do not want to be subject to probing questions under oath in a British court. What are they trying to hide?

Let us suppose that these giants of the arms industry fear going to court. If so, it is impossible for them to give evidence in the same courts as the Palestine Action protestors arrested by the police for causing criminal damage which has run into millions of pounds. Who knew that red paint could be so costly?

Nothing disturbs warmongering Zionists more than peaceful resistance supported by the law of the land, which in Britain gives people the legal right to protest against injustice.

Demonstrations, mass rallies and sit-ins have been around for as long as anyone can remember. The freedom and right to protest are a defining cornerstone of any European democracy.

Palestine Action describes itself as a pro-Palestinian protest network that uses direct action to shut down and disrupt multinational arms manufacturers and dealers. In particular, the group targets UK-based operations that provide weapons, or parts of weapons, used by Israel against the Palestinians.

At arms fairs, companies like Israel’s Elbit Systems are constantly ridiculed and humiliated for being unable to protect their factories from the eclectic group of Palestine Action activists. After all, Elbit boasts that it is a company which: “Specialises in surveillance and reconnaissance systems, optimised for all range applications – from short-range to extremely long-range. Installed on mobile platforms, as well as on stationary towers and turrets, these surveillance and reconnaissance systems enable high-quality tactical level intelligence gathering for infantry, artillery and other ground forces.”

Let’s face it, being outwitted on an almost daily basis by today’s would-be rebels and unarmed revolutionaries wearing slack jogging bottoms and hoodies must be humiliating for the Elbit executives and its subsidiaries. Little wonder that they are the butt of so many jokes.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Israel wants Palestine Action shut down for good. It’s a tall order, but this is where the pro-Israel, Zionist lobby becomes a useful tool in Tel Aviv’s many conflicts. All the lobby has to do is call to heel the politicians and parties it funds and tell them to ban the group.

This is where the likes of Britain’s Lord Walney comes in, an unremarkable, modest little man with not much to be modest about. To be blunt, this peer, described laughingly as an “independent” government advisor, is nothing but an Israeli lackey who has, in an otherwise bland 100,000-word report, criminalised protest groups active in the UK today.

Rarely a headline-maker for political strategy, as plain old John Woodcock he resigned as a Labour Party MP in 2018, hitting out at “manipulation” of an internal investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, but continued to sit in the House of Commons as an independent member. Ahead of the 2019 election, he chose not to stand again as he announced he was expecting a baby with his partner Isabel Hardman, an assistant editor at the right-wing Spectator magazine.

Naturally, Woodcock was a fervent critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. The political turncoat even urged people to vote Conservative to stop Corbyn from “getting his hands on the levers of national security and defence.”

Perhaps more significantly, in the not-too-distant past, Woodcock was the chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

Now “The” Lord Walney since 2021, and sitting as an independent (“crossbencher”) in the House of Lords upper chamber of parliament, his report recommends that the government should impose new measures to deter Palestine Action’s direct campaign against Elbit, Israel’s largest arms company. Whilst acknowledging the “enormous damage” that the activists have inflicted on the arms industry, he suggests a series of moves to restrict Palestine Action’s ability to meet and raise funds. He is also calling for “buffer zones” around factories of death like those owned by Elbit in Britain to protect the company from further protests.

Woodcock is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying that he wants to “make it an offence to belong to a protest group judged to be ‘extreme’ and which routinely uses criminal methods to campaign.” If the same twisted, Zionist logic had been applied in the early twentieth century, British women would not have been given the right to vote because the “extremists” in the Suffragettes — who definitely broke the law on occasion — would have been banned outright.

Despite posing as an “independent” government advisor, Woodcock is affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby and the arms industry. He is also the chair of the Defence Purpose Coalition, which brings together senior figures within the arms industry to promote its deadly products. Since 2011, he’s travelled to Israel on numerous occasions on trips paid for by the Israeli government and pro-Israel lobby groups, according to a recent investigation by Declassified UK.

Palestine Action released a statement about the new proposals this week. “During our nearly four-year direct-action campaign, we’ve faced arrests, raids, imprisonment, beatings, convictions and more by a state desperate to protect the Zionist war machine, over the freedom of their own citizens,” it said. “Despite this, our movement’s determination and resilience have resulted in Elbit permanently closing two factories plus being dumped by several partners and losing hundreds of millions [of pounds] in contracts with the Ministry of Defence.”

The success of the group, almost always vehemently denied by Israel, is a testament to its peaceful but direct action. However, nearly eight months into the Gaza genocide, it is clear that the arms industry is reaching breaking point with the British judicial system, which has abandoned or dismissed most trials of activists who are taken to court.

If the Zionist lobby and Lord Walney think that this scare tactic is going to force the action group to surrender, though, I’m afraid they’ve seriously underestimated it.

“When Palestine Action began we were under no illusion that the route to victory would be an easy ride,” it pointed out. “As a movement, we understand that every obstacle we face and overcome is a step closer to ending Israel’s weapons trade with Britain. For years the political class repressed us behind closed doors but refused to show their frustration at our growing campaign publicly. Now, they’re showing their hand which means we are winning.”

They accused the British peer of being more interested in “protecting the military interests of a foreign genocidal entity over the will of the British people, who overwhelmingly support imposing an arms embargo on Israel. His alliance is with the hugely profitable Elbit Systems who use Gaza as a laboratory to develop their battle-tested weaponry and are crucial to arming the ongoing genocide. Our alliance will always be with the Palestinian people.”

The Palestine Action campaigners say that they will “Shut Elbit down”.

And, I have to say, I am more convinced by their commitment to the people of Palestine than that of Lord Walney who has compromised himself by his closeness to the Israeli arms industry and the Zionist lobby. He and his report are far from independent in this matter. The UK is, for all its faults, still a democratic state whose citizens have rights and freedoms won after centuries of dissent and popular protests. Now the likes of Walney and his Zionist friends want to curtail those rights to serve the interests of the alien, apartheid state of Israel. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Pro-Palestinian protests grow at UK college as Sunak seeks crackdown

Al Mayadeen | May 11, 2024

Around thirty demonstrators continue their pro-Palestinian encampment for the third consecutive night as similar encampments have recently emerged on approximately 15 university campuses across the UK.

These student activists are urging their universities to divest from “Israel” in objection to its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. It is worth noting that divestment involves the selling off of stocks in Israeli companies or cutting financial ties in other manners. Additionally, they are demanding an immediate ceasefire in the besieged region.

Despite the peaceful demonstrations at Cambridge and various other UK campuses, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak convened with university leaders at his Downing Street offices on Thursday, reportedly attempting to prevent the surge of pro-Palestinian protests similar to those witnessed in the US in recent weeks.

In the same context, Sunak’s office extended invitations to vice-chancellors from several leading UK universities to address measures aimed at combating the “anti-Semitism” weapon of choice on campus.

As a part of these efforts, Sunak unveiled plans for the government to allocate an extra £500,000 ($623,000) to bolster the University Jewish Chaplaincy Service, aimed at providing support to Jewish students.

Accusations of a rise in antisemitism reflect a broader trend observed not only in the UK but also across Europe and the US. This trend appears to be part of efforts aimed at quelling pro-Palestinian student activism and uprisings on campuses.

It is worth noting that the charges of anti-semitism have been rampant in Western media in an attempt to silence pro-Palestine positions or any denunciation of the war on Gaza unleashed by the Israeli occupation.

Instead of upholding their students’ rights to peaceful protest and fostering an environment conducive to freedom of speech, the UK government opted to crack down on student demonstrators.

Seminary trustees adopt divestment from profiteers of Israeli genocide

Al Mayadeen | May 10, 2024

The Union Theological Seminary announced, on Thursday, that its board of trustees had approved a policy endorsing the institution’s divestment from “companies substantially and intractably benefiting from the war in Palestine.”

The decision to adopt the divestment plan was made by the board’s investment committee, which had been working on its formulation since November 2023, as per the announcement.

As a partner of Columbia University, UTS is among the first institutions in the United States to publicly commit to divesting its endowment from companies associated with the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

While housing Columbia’s theology faculty, UTS maintains a separate endowment valued at approximately $110 million, according to a statement provided to The Spectator by a UTS spokesperson.

The announcement detailed concrete actions the institution will undertake to adjust its investment portfolios, such as amending the section on “responsible investing” in the investment policy statement to explicitly address the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

“Our investment policies will continue to adapt, guided by our values, to strengthen the resolve that undergirds our decision today,” the statement adds. “We do not take this step lightly, and we do so with all humility, recognizing that our work on the global stage is far from finished. Although our investments in the war in Palestine are small because our previous, strong anti-armament screens are robust, we hope that our action today will bring needed pressure to bear to stop the killing and find a peaceful future for all.”

The decision is in line with UTS’ tradition of embracing “socially responsible investment” practices. UTS’ existing investment policy already prohibits investments in armaments, weapons, defense manufacturers, and companies involved in human rights abuses, according to the announcement. Furthermore, in 2014, UTS made history as the first higher education institution to divest from fossil fuels.

UTS’ statement also emphasizes the institution’s “early divestment from the dehumanizing system of apartheid in South Africa” and its screening procedure to ward “against investing in for-profit prisons.”

In addition to divesting, UTS is “exploring investments that proactively support humanitarian and entrepreneurial companies doing positive work in the region,” the statement stressed.

The announcement further highlighted that in addition to creating additional screens to “determine a list” of companies profiting from the Israeli war, UTS will be “identifying resources to monitor changes to company activity over time.”

The big picture

Pro-Palestine protests have swept university campuses across the United States, with calls for the alienation from “Israel” or Israeli-affiliated institutions.

As student protests and movements increasingly gained momentum, hundreds of arrests were made as police tried to thwart their efforts, and the government mobilized to introduce legislation that would ultimately punish those participating.

Israeli lobbyists and the Israeli government are relentlessly pressuring US government officials to take more action against such movements in an effort to silence the criticism targeted toward “Israel” and demands to divest from the occupation.

Despite their efforts, the actions of lobbies and governments are proving futile as universities across the United States are beginning to divest from companies profiting from the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The movement reflects a growing trend among academic institutions to align their investment strategies with ethical considerations, particularly regarding human rights violations. By divesting from such companies, universities are taking a stand against perceived injustices and contributing to pressure for change in the ongoing Palestinian struggle.

Spanish universities plan to suspend cooperation with Israeli institutions

Press TV – May 10, 2024

Scores of Spanish universities plan to suspend cooperation with the Israeli universities that have not called for peace in the occupying regime’s ongoing genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.

The plan was announced in an open letter by the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities, which oversees 50 public and 26 private universities, on Thursday.

The universities, the letter read, planned to suspend collaborations with Israeli universities that “have not expressed a firm commitment to peace and compliance with international humanitarian law.”

In addition, the universities pledged to “intensify cooperation with the Palestinian scientific and higher education system and expand our cooperation, volunteering, and care programs for the refugee population.”

The schools said they were showing solidarity with “the feelings of our campuses and the demand that is spreading from them.”

They were referring to ongoing pro-Palestinian encampments and rallies that have been going on across many universities throughout the European country in protest at the Israeli war on Gaza.

At least 34,904 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed so far during the war, which began following al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

The letter also called for a permanent ceasefire in the war and transfer of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory, which is enduring a simultaneous Israeli siege.

Over the past weeks, student protests have gained momentum across western Europe, with the participants raging against the brutal Israeli military onslaught and pressing their schools to divest from the Israeli companies that contribute to the genocide.

The demonstrators have taken their cue from pro-Palestinian student protests across the United States, which have spread across numerous of American colleges.

More than 1,000 people have reportedly been arrested on US campuses since April 18, when a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University in New York was forcefully removed by the police.

Poles taking to the streets against EU Green Deal

By Olivier Bault | Remix News | May 9, 2024

On Friday, May 10, Poles will be taking to the street in a protest organized by the legendary Solidarity trade union. Solidarity, which was the main dissident social movement against communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, is now demanding a referendum on the EU Green Deal. Its current leader, Piotr Duda, has even called the EU Green Deal a new “red plague,” in reference to communism.

The protest is supported by Law and Justice (PiS), the main opposition party in Poland, and also by the other parties of its United Right coalition as well as by the Confederation, an alliance of Christian nationalists and libertarians to the right of the United Right. The trade union, however, makes “the whole political class” in Poland responsible for the EU’s climate policy and notes that it warned from the outset of the threats linked to that policy, which means it makes the United Right leaders responsible too, as the EU Green Deal was adopted during their eight years in power.

“The solutions implemented under the Green Deal in the future will translate into, among other things, increases in electricity and heating bills, new taxes on energy and fuel, a ban on heating with fossil fuels, as well as increases in food prices and the country’s food insecurity. NSZZ Solidarity has decided to loudly express its opposition to such policies,” Solidarity’s leaders wrote in a press release published in mid-March.

They also wrote:

“The Solidarity trade union, which won Poland’s freedom in the past and later used it many times for just causes, has again decided to reach for the highest form of direct democracy, which is a nationwide referendum in which citizens will be asked about the continuation of the implementation of the Green Deal. The referendum will be preceded by an information campaign. This will allow for a broad awareness-building public debate on the real effects of the EU’s climate policy so that every citizen of Poland will be able to express his or her opinion on the subject based on reliable knowledge. After all, EU policy should not be determined by officials in Brussels, but based on the consent of the citizens of member states.”

The May 10 protest will start at noon on the Plac Zamkowy Square in central Warsaw, when farmers are expected to turn up en masse as they did on March 6 when a large farmer protest was brutally repressed by Donald Tusk’s left-liberal government.

However, it is not only farmers who are going to be very negatively affected by the EU Green Deal. As the Ordo Iuris legal think tank stresses in an EU-wide petition against the Green Deal it has just launched, not only is European agriculture facing a catastrophe, but car drivers and homeowners will have to pay a high price for plans dictated not by reason and based not on consultations, but driven by ideology.

We can still “Stop the Green Deal” in its current form, we remind people in our petition, as it is a matter of the political decisions made by the heads of state and government in the European Council that can be later translated into new EU law processed through the EU Council (where ministers of the EU-27 meet) and the European Parliament.

This is why we demand not only that there should be a referendum in Poland on the Green Deal, but that an EU summit should be convened to work through the demands of farmers and other actors from across Europe.

We should all have in mind that under the current plans, the production of food and many intermediate and industrial goods will not stop, but will only be transferred outside the European Union, where the EU’s absurd climate regulations do not apply. This will only make matters worse for our planet and it will push millions of Europeans toward poverty and destroy the European Union’s economic competitiveness.

We encourage all citizens of EU countries to sign the petition against the EU Green Deal here.

UK Fire Brigades Union calls on members not to help police remove pro-Palestine protesters

MEMO | May 9, 2024

The UK’s Fire Brigades Union has called on its members not to assist police in removing protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

In a statement, the union said: “The FBU is aware that pro-Palestine protesters are holding further demonstrations in Leicester. Previously, firefighters have been asked to assist the police in removing protestors. The FBU advises all members not to be involved in law enforcement activities.”

FBU General-Secretary, Matt Wrack, added: “The role of a firefighter is to save lives and protect the community. There is no justification for firefighters being asked to assist the Police in the removal of protesters… We support the rights of the protesters and the call for peace and justice for Gaza.”

While FBU representative in Leicestershire, Kasy LeGall, added: “The Fire Brigades Union has a long and proud history of standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine. This solidarity extends to all those currently protesting for a cease-fire and an end to the supply of arms to Israel.”

Iran’s POSITION On Israel And Gaza w/Professor Marandi

Sabby Sabs | May 7, 2024

Palestine activists smash into and occupy Elbit’s Leicestershire drone factory

MEMO | May 8, 2024

Several activists from Palestine Action have again targeted Elbit’s Leicestershire drone factory, UAV Tactical Systems. One contingent smashed through the fence and into the weapons manufacturer using a lorry, which two activists have climbed on top off. Simultaneously, another contingent scaled the building and are currently occupying the roof of the Israeli-owned drone maker.

Red paint has been sprayed across the building to symbolise the company’s alleged involvement in spilling Palestinian blood, whilst those on the roof have used tools to break through it and expose the contents inside the “murder” factory.

“UAV Tactical Systems is majority owned by Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, which manufactures 85 per cent of Israel’s military drone fleet amongst other lethal arms,” said Palestine Action in a media release. “Despite the company’s earlier attempts to obscure its relationship with Israel, previous export licences reveal that drone technologies are regularly exported from the factory to the apartheid state.”

Nevertheless, the company denied that it supplies “the Israeli military or Israeli ministry of defence”. It was quoted as saying by the Leicester Mercury that, “Any claims to the contrary are completely false.”

According to the activist group, the Elbit and UAV Tactical Systems business model is based on, firstly, “Facilitating Israel’s war crimes including genocide and apartheid.” In doing so, it added, “Elbit develop its technologies through ‘battle-testing’ on Palestinians, before repackaging and selling on products used to fuel violence abroad.”

UAV Tactical Systems’ flagship drone, the Watchkeeper, has been used by the British military in Iraq, Afghanistan and the English Channel. “It is modelled on the notorious and deadly Hermes 450 drone, after the latter was ‘tested’ on Palestinians,” alleged Palestine Action.

Elbit drones are used regularly by the Israeli military during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. According to the United Nations, since 7 October the Israeli military has killed at least 34,735 Palestinians — mainly children and women — and wounded more than 78,000 others. Over 70,000 housing units have been destroyed. Previous bombardments have forced over one million Palestinians to flee to Rafah in Gaza, which the Israeli military is now invading despite it being the only supposed “safe zone” left in the besieged enclave.

A week ago, the US paused a shipment of munitions to Israel over the then impending Rafah invasion. Yet, the UK government has failed to impose a two-way arms embargo and continues to allow Elbit Systems to operate in this country.

“This country is a signatory to the Genocide convention,” explained one Palestine Action activists ahead of its latest move against the Elbit factory in Braunstone, Leicestershire. “These laws are not to be discounted just because it’s politically expedient to do so. They were set up for a reason and I cannot accept that the country I was born in and have lived in all my life is deciding to flout those laws.”

Another insisted that, “If the government isn’t going to act, it is my personal, moral and legal right to take direct action.”

Dutch police smash pro-Palestine protest camp

The Cradle | May 7, 2024

Riot police bulldozed barricades and temporarily detained 125 people to break up a pro-Palestine student protest at the University of Amsterdam in the early hours of 7 May, Reuters reported.

Four of the protesters are still being held on charges of public violence and insulting an officer, while the remainder have been released.

Organizers said they were “taking back this campus” in solidarity with Palestine and “in the spirit” of student protests that began in the US in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Along with pro-Palestine demonstrators at universities in the US and Europe, the Dutch students are demanding the university boycott academics and businesses in Israel.

Similar protests have occurred at Ghent University in Belgium and France’s prestigious Sciences Po University.

The National reported that in a social media message shortly before 3 am, organizers said they were being “violently evicted” by police arriving in riot vans.

Dutch television showed footage of police wielding batons advancing on the protesters and destroying tents.

Reuters adds that the police claimed student protesters ignored requests from university administrators and the mayor for the protesters to leave the campus and threw stones and fireworks.

“The police’s input was necessary to restore order. We see the footage on social media. We understand that those images may appear as intense,” police claimed.

Due to pressure from students, the University of Amsterdam published a list of eight research projects with ties to Israel.

It said one was about detecting explosives but “does not contribute to Israel’s military actions,” while others involved machine learning, gender issues, and safer streets.

Israel has used machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate bombing targets in Gaza.

A group of academics called Dutch Scholars for Palestine expressed support for the student protests.

“We have to resist political frames that will cast their efforts as antisemitic or a danger to the university community,” they said.

The media in the US and Europe have attempted to cast the protests as driven by antisemitism rather than by anger at Israel’s horrific bombing campaign in Gaza that has killed over 14,000 children.

Many Jewish students have participated in the university protests in opposition to Israeli policies.

“As the death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza increases … we should be proud of our students who are standing up to these abhorrent atrocity crimes,” the academics added.

Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 6, 2024

I think the striking events we have witnessed in American society over the last few months—and especially the last few days—are best understood if we consider a shrewd observation widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who are not allowed to criticize.

From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism. During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refusedniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal aspect of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.

Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this was possibly propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Soon afterward, a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting engulfed some 200 cities across our entire nation, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike during that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced as outrageous any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell that violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”

During those years many universities became heavily caught up in such controversies with Yale renaming its Calhoun residential college in early 2017 and the list of name changes due to the 2020 George Floyd protests is so long that it warrants its own Wikipedia page, a list that notably included some of our most storied military bases such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood. Verbal or even physical attacks against the symbols and statues of America’s most famous presidents and national heroes became quite common and were often favorably reported in the media, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus all being vilified and denounced, sometimes with elite endorsement. A lead opinion piece in the New York Times called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced with a towering statue of a black woman while one of the regular Times columnists repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington should suffer a similar fate. Many observers argued that 2020 America almost seemed to be undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, amid widespread claims that much of our entire historical past was irretrievably tainted and therefore had to be expunged from the public square.

Most of these political protests, especially those on college campuses, were widely hailed by those holding the media megaphones as representing one of the greatest virtues of American democracy. The many elite defenders of these social and cultural upheavals argued that these events demonstrated the great strength of our society, which freely allowed the fiercest public attacks against our most sacred national icons and heroes, providing the sort of searing self-criticism that would surely be permitted almost nowhere else in the world.

That long history of permitted or even glorified public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost them perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct. Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.

As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations. As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.

Instead of attacking Hamas, Netanyahu took advantage of the wave of global sympathy by unleashing an unprecedented military assault against Gaza’s more than two million civilians, apparently intending to kill huge numbers of them and drive the remainder into Egypt’s Sinai desert, allowing Israel to annex their territory and resettle it with Jews. Soon afterward, the Israeli government began distributing assault rifles to the Jewish Settlers of the West Bank, ordering some 24,000 of those automatic weapons for that purpose. Putting such armaments in the hands of religious fanatics would surely lead to local massacres and these might provide an excuse for driving all the millions of Palestinians over the border in Jordan. The ultimate result would be the creation of a racially-pure Greater Israel stretching “From the River to the Sea,” the longstanding dream of the Zionist movement. And if he were successful, Netanyahu’s place in Jewish history might become a glorious one, with his many venal sins and blunders easily overlooked.

As American airlifts supplied an unending flood of the necessary munitions, the Israelis began a massive aerial bombardment campaign against densely-populated Gaza and its helpless residents. Secure in their underground tunnels, relatively few Hamas fighters were killed, but Gaza’s civilians suffered devastating losses, much of it inflicted by two thousand pound bombs, almost never previously deployed against urban targets. Large portions of Gaza were soon transformed into moonscapes, with some 100,000 buildings destroyed, including hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, government offices, bakeries, and all the other infrastructure necessary for maintaining civilian life. After just a few weeks, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon much of Gaza was already worse than had been suffered by German cities after years of Allied bombing attacks during World War II.

Although Netanyahu was strictly secular, he played to his religious base by publicly declaring the Palestinians to be the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Many other top Israeli leaders voiced very similar genocidal sentiments, and some of the more zealously religious Israeli soldiers and commanders probably took those statements quite literally.

This gigantic bloodlust was further inflamed as the Israeli government and its supportive propagandists began promoting outrageous Hamas atrocity-hoaxes such as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies, sexual mutilations, and gang-rapes. The notoriously pro-Israel global media credulously reported these stories, using them to deflect attention from the enormous ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians. To ensure that the coverage remained one-sided, the Israelis targeted independent journalists in Gaza for death, killing some 140 of them over the last few months, a figure as large as the combined total in all the world’s other wars over the last several years.

With Israel’s leaders publicly declaring their genocidal plans for their Palestinian enemies and their troops committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, international organizations gradually came under serious pressure to involve themselves in the ongoing conflict. In late December, South Africa filed a 91-page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. Within a few weeks the ICJ jurists issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those accusations and declaring that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, with Israel’s own appointed judge, a former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, concurring in most of those verdicts.

But instead of backing off, Netanyahu government merely redoubled his attacks against Gaza, tightening the blockade of food shipments by banning the UN organization responsible for distributing them, believing that starvation together with bombs and missiles would be the most effective means of killing or driving out all the Palestinians.

Over the last few months I discussed these unfortunate developments in a long series of articles, with most of the material also summarized in a couple of interviews with Mike Whitney:

• Gazacaust: Placing the Blame Where It Belongs
  Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 5, 2024 • 4,600 Words
• The Jewish Roots of the Gaza Rampage
  Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 11, 2024 • 5,900 Words

In past decades, these horrifying events might have gone relatively unnoticed, with the overwhelmingly pro-Israel gatekeepers of our mainstream media ensuring that little if any of this distressing information reached the eyes or ears of ordinary Americans. But technological developments had changed this media landscape and video on relatively uncensored social platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter now easily circumvented that blockade. Despite their decades of suffering and oppression, Gaza’s Palestinians were a fully modern people, well-equipped with smartphones, and the scenes they filmed were shared worldwide, quickly attracting huge audiences among the younger Americans who relied upon social media as their primary source of news.

For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered by cruel oppressors. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.

A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite failing to provide any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of its population obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing:

Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the 1960s. So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished as I described at the time:

With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.

As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.

A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.

The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.

I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.

 

I’d think that most of the students involved were absolutely stunned at that these developments. For decades, they and their predecessors had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering a sliver of such vicious retaliation, an organized campaign that quickly forced the resignation of two of the Ivy League presidents who had allowed their protests. Some of their student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protesters were harshly threatened, but the horrifying images from Gaza continued to reach their smartphones. As Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL had previously explained in a leaked phone call, “We have a major TikTok problem.”

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Swarming Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found tied and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.

After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible. In early March, progressive icon Ralph Nader focused attention on that point, noting that Gazan fatalities must surely be massively under-reported, and he speculated that the true number of deaths might have already reached 200,000. Although that total seemed quite high to me at the time, Nader’s figure usefully emphasized the absurdly low numbers widely quoted in the media.

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings, and that sort of single datapoint suggests the magnitude of the media under-count after seven months of horror, with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggesting the same thing in a recent interview. Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.

These grim circumstances have naturally sparked a continuing wave of public student protests against Israel for committing these monstrous crimes and against our own Biden Administration for enabling it with money and munitions. Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of our highest-ranking mainstream academics, a very sober-minded scholar of the Realist School, and in an interview last week he expressed little surprise at these matters. After all, he pointed out, Israel was obviously an Apartheid-state currently committing a genocide before the eyes of the entire world so political protests on college campuses were only to be expected.

Throughout these last few months, pro-Israel partisans have regularly denounced the the anti-Zionism of their opponents as antisemitic and insisting that it be suppressed. Back in February I had noted the ironic implications of their position:

This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.

But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.

These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.

It is rather surprising for the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world to be loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.

• American Pravda: Gaza, Jewish Power, and the Holocaust
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 19, 2024 • 10,400 Words

An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.

This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.

Although those Congressional demands for a crackdown at Columbia were obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.

The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled down to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself be brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant, something that utterly shocked CNN anchor Jim Acosta when he reported it.

Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the police on the scene stood by and did nothing as UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.

I have never heard of any American case in which organized mobs of outside thugs were allowed to violently assault peaceful student protesters on their own campus, and this seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships than our own country’s history. The closest example from our own history might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.

However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy does come to mind. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted together with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.

This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and as a consequence conservatives soon began organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys aimed at providing physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC and elsewhere had disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so it’s hardly surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.

Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.

Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought as well as academic freedom, and may also serve to put enormous pressure on other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and donor-controlled Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the citizens have Christian roots.

While I doubt that any arrests along those lines would occur or stand up to legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.

Put in simple form, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly be a remarkable legal development in our society.

This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”

They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.

Although it’s difficult to be sure, I personally think that passage of that controversial House bill may have been a major strategic blunder for the pro-Israel forces, the ADL, and the other Jewish groups behind it. Jews only constitute about 2% of American population and over the last several generations many of them seem to have waged a successful campaign to gain control over the key nodes of our society, but this has always required that their growing strength and influence remain invisible. However, the absolutely lock-step and uniform American political support for Israel’s ongoing massacre of the Palestinians has raised the awareness of some elements of our population and this legislative attempt to essentially outlaw criticism of Jews and Israel may have a similar impact. Views that had previously only circulated in extreme fringe circles may now begin to gain much greater traction.

For example, cartoonist Scott Adams has become a popular commentator in conservative, anti-Woke circles and he just released a blistering denunciation of the proposed legislation in which he sounded no different than far more extreme figures.

🤯🤯@ScottAdamsSays just said everything @NickJFuentes has been saying for years, and now aligns with every single groyper on this issue. pic.twitter.com/m4XAgvrsl4

— 🩺The Pharmacopiean💊 (@FarAwayAndCozy) May 4, 2024

During the early decades of the Twentieth Century the enormous Russian Empire was only about 4% Jewish, but after the heavily Jewish Bolsheviks seized power, the top political leadership of that country became overwhelmingly of that one ethnicity. This enormous, blatant mismatch between ruled and rulers naturally provoked a great deal of hostility in the broader public, and the Bolsheviks responded to this problem by outlawing antisemitism, with the penalty sometimes even including summary execution.

Since America’s Jewish groups do not possess such extreme administrative power, they have been forced to rely upon concealment and political manipulation to achieve their ends, and they may have severely over-reached themselves with that latest legislative effort to outlaw criticism. More and more people may start to pay closer attention to the seemingly inexplicable political decisions taken by so many of our elected officials while also noticing the unusual composition of the top ranks of our government. On that last point, one of my 2023 articles pointed out the obvious:

Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.

• President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
• Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
• Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
• Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
• Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
• Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
• Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
• National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)
• Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
• Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)

Oddly enough, while America’s current political predicament might have alarmed some important individuals from the first half of the last century, it probably would hardly have surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:

Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.

In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.

Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.

Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.

Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.

I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.

These same views were also fully articulated in the later books and memoirs of prominent former Military Intelligence officers such as Prof. John Beaty and Prof. Revilo Oliver.

• American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words

When we consider a government run by individuals who seem to have little political independence, it is interesting to consider the means by which control is actually exercised over these nominal leaders. Several years ago I discussed some strong indications of the possible means, perhaps explaining strange decisions or reversals that seem to defy logic.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

• American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 29, 2019 • 6,400 Words

More and more thoughtful Americans are becoming aware that on so many important matters our two major political parties often seem more like separate wings of a single political entity, sometimes labeled the “uniparty.” I discussed this disturbing phenomenon in the closing paragraphs of my original American Pravda article:

Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

Several months ago a young military serviceman named Aaron Bushnell from a strongly Christian background became so distraught at his country’s active involvement in what he regarded as the supreme crime of genocide that he set himself on fire and died as an act of protest, an event certainly without precedent in American history and extraordinarily rare elsewhere in the world. Although the story quickly vanished from our own media, the coverage on global social media was enormous, and may have lasting consequences.

After discussing that tragic incident, I then went on to say that the dire fate of Gaza’s Palestinians might ultimately be seen as having played a similar role, suddenly allowing both Americans and others around the world to glimpse the long-hidden rulers of our own country:

For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.

Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.

Starbucks continues to feel weight of global boycott over Gaza war

MEMO | May 3, 2024

Starbucks continues to feel the weight of global boycott campaigns over its support of Israel’s war in Gaza which has claimed the lives of over 34,500 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children.

The coffee chain announced a sharp decline in global sales; the worst since the pandemic, which resulted in its share price dropping to a 21-month low. Starbucks reported a 15 per cent drop in net income (to $772 million) compared to this time last year.

Global boycott campaigns have also forced the company to lower its profit forecast for the fiscal year 2024 as the performance of its cafes is expected to remain weak in the near future.

“In a challenging environment, this quarter’s results do not reflect the strength of our brand, our capabilities or the opportunities ahead,” CEO Laxman Narasimhan said in a statement.

The company has been trying to counter what it describes as “ongoing false and misleading information being shared about Starbucks” online.

In October, Starbucks sued Workers United, which has organised workers in at least 370 US Starbucks stores, over a pro-Palestinian message posted on a union social media account.

Starbucks said it was trying to get the union to stop using its name and likeness as the post also drew protests from pro-Israel demonstrators.

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Starbucks has seen a continual drop in sales and profits as a result of its actions.