The Press Conference
Last night, President Trump welcomed Prime Minister Netanyahu to the White House, the first foreign leader to be invited since he took office two weeks ago. The policy announcements from the press conference were historic, including President Trumps stunning announcement about the relocation of Gazans and the United States taking over and developing the Gaza Strip. You can watch the press conference in its entirety above.
For a full recap of the topics discussed, read the YNet report here. I will share analysis from the experts in a special update on Friday.
In addition to the press conference, President Trump signed new Executive Orders just before his visit with the Prime Minister:
The renewal of the "maximum pressure" policy against Iran, the name for the heavy economic sanctions policy he imposed on the Islamic Republic during his first term
Withdrawing the United States from the U.N.’s Human Rights Counci and withdrawing funding from the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, which employed countless Hamas terrorists who participated in the 10/7 attacks (and many of the hostages were kept in its facilities)
FDD’s Rich Goldberg writes: “In two strokes of the pen, the president is taking aim at two of the biggest sponsors of antisemitism in the world. UNRWA is a front for Hamas that raises Palestinians to hate Jews and Israel. The so-called Human Rights Council is an anti-American, pro-Beijing body that dedicates enormous time and resources to delegitimizing Israel and promoting a modern-day blood libel against the world’s only Jewish state.”
Hostage Update
Three hostages are expected to be released this coming Saturday, the fifth release since the ceasefire agreement.
There are now currently 76 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 79 hostages remaining in total)
18 hostages have been released so far in the first phase of the agreement
20 are now remaining on the list for release during the first stage of the ceasefire.
12 of the 20 remaining hostages still to be freed are alive and 8 are dead
7 are adults over the age of 50
10 are sick or injured
3 are members of the Bibas family (Shiri Silberman Bibas and her two children, Ariel, who was 4 years old when taken captive, and Kfir, who was 9 months when taken captive)
6 hostages are Americans: Meet the Seven American Hostages Still Held By Hamas
24 hostages will remain in captivity after Phase I and have not been declared dead.
4 are soldiers
7 are residents of the Gaza border communities
11 were abducted from the Nova music festival
2 are foreign workers, one from Thailand and one Nepal
On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
176 hostages in total have been released or rescued
The bodies of 40 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
8 hostages have been rescued by troops alive
Of the 79 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
35 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
Thus, at most, 44 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
Hamas is also holding 2 Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015 (civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who have been held in Gaza for a decade), as well as the body of 1 IDF soldiers who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)
Casualties (+2)
1,848 Israelis have been killed including 844 IDF soldiers since October 7th (+2 since Sunday)
Sgt. Maj. (res.) Ofer Yung, 39 and Sgt. Maj. (res.) Avraham Tzvi Tzvika Friedman, 43 were killed when a Palestinian gunman infiltrated an army checkpoint in the northern West Bank on Tuesday morning and opened fire.
The South: 405 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed (no change since Sunday)
The North: 131 Israelis (84 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (no change since Sunday)
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
2,572 (no change since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 495 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
5,696 (+10 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 846 (+3 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
The increase in injuries is attributed to ongoing operations in the West Bank
The Gaza Casualty Count:
According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 47,540 (+123 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 111,618 (+47 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
[MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
Read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled "Gaza Health Ministry." The analysis found that "9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data" and that "an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates."
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.
Listen
[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: The Road to Riyadh - with Nadav Eyal
As Israelis welcome home more hostages after 15 months in Hamas captivity, we sat down with Nadav Eyal to discuss what their stories reveal about their captivity, their role in Israel’s national healing process, and the broader implications for Israeli society. We also discuss the ongoing negotiations for the next phase of hostage releases, the political stakes surrounding Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, and how these developments could shape Israel and the region.
[PODCAST] The Free Press: Bari Weiss with Simon Sebag Montefiore: History Is Not Over
New Poll
aChord Research Institute at Hebrew University published a poll worth reading (shared on X by Barak Ravid with Axios) as it offers a glimpse into what many Israelis feel right now:
According to the poll 52% of Israelis support completing the 2nd phase of the hostage deal (only 24% oppose) and 66% think returning all hostages is more important than dismantling Hamas (18% oppose)
60% of Israelis support a Trump-led peace initiative that includes normalization with Saudi Arabia and a path for Palestinian state.
Israel/Middle East Related Articles
[REPORT] Terror Finance at the State Department and USAID by The Middle East Forum
The Middle East Forum’s multi-year study of USAID and State Department spending has uncovered $164 million of approved grants to radical organizations, with at least $122 million going to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters. There are problems with the reliability of government spending data, as reported below. It should also be noted that these are the approved grant sums; while the actual amounts outlaid are unknown.
Example: Since 2016, USAID has given over $900,000 to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a Gaza-based terror charity, on October 1, 2023, just six days before the Hamas’s October 7 attacks, in which almost 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered. Just a few months earlier, in February 2023, Bayader organized an event with senior Hamas officials in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, in collaboration with Western Islamist charity Islamic Relief, another former USAID grantee. Its 2021 annual report notes “coordination” and “meetings” with Hamas’s Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Works, Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Agriculture.
Millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.
USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be “cleansed” from the “impurity of the Jews,” among dozens of other chilling examples. USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.
Records of federal funding, particularly through USAID, are obfuscated by deficient disclosure practices, deleted data, and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions of dollars given to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorism-stricken areas of the globe.
Link: Terror Finance at the State Department and USAID - Middle East Forum
Hamas May Be Cheering, But It Is Writhing in Pain by Ehud Yaari with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
The signs of Hamas’s regret at having started this war on October 7 are already visible. The group’s highest-ranking military official in the Gaza Strip to have survived the war—Gaza City Brigade Commander Izz al-Din Haddad—has already begun to lie without batting an eye, saying that Hamas did not have any choice but to deliver a preemptive strike on Simchat Torah because of intelligence it had obtained from Unit 8200 indicating that Israel was about to attack Gaza with full force immediately after the Sukkot holiday.
All the stories about how Hamas has swiftly recovered, replenished its depleted ranks with new recruits, and resumed governing should all be taken with a grain of salt. It has not renewed any of its military capabilities and, for the time being, has not yet reformed its battalions. Nor has it resumed rocket production or tunneling work.
Importantly, the local population has learned that it can both hate Israel and despise Hamas.
The challenges Hamas is likely to face further down the road are formidable. The group may have a large amount of money, but it has gotten that money by scalping goods at the civilian population’s expense.
They have been practically begging Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to assume responsibility for administering Gaza, but the PA won’t enter unless Hamas first disarms. Without the PA’s involvement, neither the Emiratis nor the Saudis will open their wallets, and Israel isn’t about to let Qatar sneak its way in.
The Rafah border crossing will be under the strict supervision of an American company, and the Egyptians will be very cautious there.
Succinctly put: for those Israelis who have already begun to weep bitterly because Hamas survived and supposedly emerged with the upper hand, they should think again.
Why are ‘anti-racists’ silent about Arbel Yehud’s terrible ordeal? By Brendan O’Neill with The Spectator
Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem. Here we had a diminutive woman being paraded through a baying mob of hollering men. They barked religious slogans at her. They shoved and jostled to get a better view of the marked woman. They thrust their mobile phones in her face to capture her terror for posterity.
Yet even as we celebrate the freeing of this 29-year-old woman, we cannot overlook today’s diabolical scenes. It was a positively medieval spectacle. Ms Yehud was displayed like a war trophy, forced to walk through a crowd of fuming men roaring ‘Allahu Akbar!’ at her. The Jew-hating militants of Hamas, in their green bandanas, towered over her.
This was not just a ‘handover’ of an Israeli captive. It was a kind of ritualistic humiliation. A Jew was hauled to a public square packed with men who hate her kind. She was made into a spectacle for the sport of radical Islamists.
Here’s my question, though: why didn’t today’s events shake the Western conscience too? Where’s our wrath at the sight of a Jewish woman being mobbed by Jew-hating men just three days after Holocaust Memorial Day?
Where are our anti-racists? Where are those people who will brand you an ‘Islamophobe’ if you so much as scuff a page of the Koran or a ‘fascist’ if you criticise mass immigration? We live in an era in which tabloid criticism of Meghan Markle is denounced as lunatic white supremacy while the mobbing of a Jew by members of a terror group founded to kill Jews is shrugged off as normal.
Where are our feminists? Where are those well-paid columnists who write pained screeds about how sexist it is for the waiter to give the bill to their boyfriend rather than to them, yet who seemingly have nothing to say about the public tormenting of a woman whose only ‘crime’ is her Jewishness?
They really have nothing to say about a member of their sex who was forced for 16 months to break bread with the men who slaughtered a thousand of her co-religionists?
What’s shocking is the indifference of the West’s intellectuals. Too many of them failed to make a full-throated condemnation of the atrocities of 7 October, and now too many look the other way as a Jewish woman is made into a spectacle of hate and derision.
Link: Why are 'anti-racists' silent about Arbel Yehud's terrible ordeal?
US should demand the extradition of terrorists who killed its citizens by Joseph Frager with Jewish National Syndicate
Malki Roth was a 15-year-old American girl enjoying a day out in Jerusalem. On Aug. 9, 2001, she was one of 16 people, including three other Americans, killed in the bombing of a Sbarro pizzeria. Her murderer was Jordanian national Ahlam Tamimi, who, despite being given 16 life sentences, plus 250 years, was released as part of a 2011 deal Israel made to secure the release of Gilad Shalit.
Tamimi expressed her “delight” that she killed so many children. Malki’s parents have continually tried to have her extradited to the United States and bring her to justice. In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first administration, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an arrest warrant for Tamimi, who is on America’s most-wanted terrorist list. It has also offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest.
Rabbi Dr. David Applebaum, and his daughter, Nava, on the eve of her wedding, were brutally murdered on Sept. 9, 2003, during the bombing of Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem. Applebaum was chief of the emergency room and trauma at the Sha’are Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem. One of his killers, Ahmad Obeid, received seven life sentences for his part in the bombing.
Obeid has been or will be released as part of the present exchange for Israeli hostages. His accomplice, Mari Abu Saida, who received 11 life sentences, is also being released.
The recidivist rate for the terrorists who were released in the Shalit deal was 82%.
Among those terrorists was senior Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The United States cannot stand by as the killers of its citizens walk away freely. Tamimi, Obeid, Abu Saida, Jabarin and all of the other terrorists with blood on their hands should be extradited as soon as possible to face the full extent of American law.
Link: US should demand the extradition of terrorists who killed its citizens
Why Does Qatar Keep Helping Terrorists? by Jonathan Schanzer and Natalie Ecanow with Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Just hours before leaving power, the Biden administration agreed to trade a Taliban prisoner for two Americans held in Afghanistan. Qatar facilitated the swap. Twelve hundred miles away, the Qatar-brokered Gaza cease-fire took effect. Hamas released three Israeli hostages in exchange for 90 Palestinian terrorists.
Upon their release, the two Americans in Taliban custody — Ryan Corbett and William McKenty — departed Kabul for Doha, where U.S. officials were waiting to hand over notorious Afghan narco-terrorist Khan Mohammed. Mohammed was serving two life sentences in a California prison for distributing heroin and opium to assist the Taliban. He is the first convicted narco-terrorist in American history [they made a special category of terrorism just for him –and now he’s free].
And the beat goes on. As the Qatari-brokered Gaza cease-fire took effect on January 19, one day before Donald Trump was set to take office, Hamas freed three Israeli hostages. Twenty-four hours later, Israel released dozens of Palestinian prisoners under the terms of the cease-fire deal.
The prisoner swaps continue. This week, Hamas released four female Israeli soldiers that Hamas kidnapped on October 7, 2023. In turn, an estimated 200 additional terrorists were released.
Doha is eager to end the war in a manner that will ensure Hamas’s survival. This is hardly surprising considering that Qatar has showered Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars and sheltered the group’s senior leaders for over a decade.
A course correction is needed. The Trump administration might start with an official policy review. At minimum, we must cease allowing Qatar to facilitate prisoner swaps that benefit terrorists. Beyond that, America would benefit from more stringent standards to help us differentiate friend from foe.
Qatar's 'Day After' Plan for Gaza: Keeping Hamas in Power by Khaled Abu Toameh in Gatestone Institute
Why does Qatar, the largest funder and sponsor of Hamas, have such a strong desire to restore the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Gaza Strip? To guarantee Hamas's continued domination of the Gaza Strip. Qatar has no problem with the PA... taking up its duties there again as long as Hamas is permitted to maintain its grasp on power and preserve its security and military forces and capabilities.
The Qataris seem to realize that Hamas cannot undertake the task of rebuilding the Gaza Strip on its own... They also seem to understand that the international community will not agree to transfer funds to the Gaza Strip through Hamas. Qatar needs the PA in the Gaza Strip to facilitate the flow of millions of dollars in Western aid.
Two days after the announcement of the ceasefire-hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdulrahman Al Thani said that Doha hopes for the return of the PA to the Gaza Strip... ‘If they proceed in good faith, this will continue, and hopefully lead to a permanent ceasefire.
Earlier this month, the PA-Qatar crisis reached its peak when the PA government... decided to suspend the broadcasts of the Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera television for supporting and promoting Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups.
If the Palestinian Authority is allowed to operate in the Gaza Strip while Hamas is still in power, another slaughter of Israelis, most likely worse than the October 7 carnage, will occur... They want the PA to act as a front to maintain Hamas's hold on power — as a cover for keeping Hamas in power.
Qatar has one main purpose: to safeguard its friends in Hamas, continue promoting radical Islam, and deceive Westerners into believing that the Jihadists are a better alternative... Whether the new US administration will be as gullible as other Westerners in trusting Qatar remains to be seen.
Link: Qatar's 'Day After' Plan for Gaza: Keeping Hamas in Power
Antisemitism
“I Was Hounded, Day In, Day Out”: Alice Nderitu, the U.N.’s former special adviser on the prevention of genocide, on her contentious tenure. An AIR MAIL exclusive by Johanna Berkman
Last November, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declined to renew the contract of U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who did not label Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide, even while other U.N. officials have either done so or released reports which make this claim.
“It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C. [Democratic Republic of Congo], not for Myanmar,” she says. “The focus was always Israel.”
Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on October 15, called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she says, “what they did. I described it.... And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.”
That night, a U.N. Office of Human Rights civil servant sent her an e-mail on which he copied several top U.N. officials, including the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and also the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. (In February of 2023, that undersecretary-general would go viral for saying, in a television interview with Sky News, “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us. As you know, it is a political movement.”)
In his e-mail, the U.N. civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the U.N., this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual, as was his request that Nderitu review her “statement with the aim to ensure greater balance and harmonize it with similar UN leaders statements.”
Little more than a week later, Nderitu received a two-page letter signed by an unnamed group of “concerned UN staff including Palestinians.” While they joined her “in condemning the intentional attacks and abduction of Israeli civilians by Hamas,” they wrote, “we expected that your statement regarding Israel’s attacks on and collective punishment of Palestinian civilians would have been equally clear and unequivocal.”
In Nderitu’s final months at the U.N., the secretary-general’s daily press briefings became a forum where reporters, including those from Al-Arabiya, a Saudi state-owned outlet, and Al Jazeera, which is backed by the Qatari government, asked questions not just about Israel’s alleged genocide but also about Nderitu.”They made me the centerpiece,” she says. “Every day they were talking about me. Why wouldn’t she say there’s a genocide? Everybody thinks there’s a genocide. Why won’t she say it?”
Righteous Among the United Nations by Seth Mandel in Commentary
Alice Wairimu Nderitu did something very few officials who work for the United Nations have done: She approached the subject of Israel with dispassion and professionalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she’s now out of a job.
Nderitu “traveled to refugee camps in Bangladesh and Iraq; to Brazil, where the government invited her to assess how the Yanomami and other Indigenous tribes were faring; to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess the extent of genocide denial; and to Chad, to assess the risk to the various populations of Darfur in Sudan.
All of that flew under the radar. Then came Oct. 7, 2023 and Hamas’s mass slaughter and sexual torment of Israeli civilians. Nderitu put out a statement condemning it, and the floodgates of harassment—both within and without the United Nations—opened.
Immediately, a UN civil servant wrote an email complaining about Nderitu to several top officials, warning that her condemnation of Hamas “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.”
Then, of course, came the open letter from “concerned UN staff” pressuring Nderitu to treat Hamas as Israel’s moral equal. On Dec. 9, she was greeted with a Change.org petition [that stated]: “we demand Nderitu’s immediate resignation and for her to be held accountable for her failure to act in response to mass atrocities in Gaza.”
The next venue for the harassment campaign against Nderitu was the UN’s press briefing room, where representatives from Saudi and Qatari state outlets trashed Nderitu by name.
What might we learn from this? The obvious answer is: The genocide specialist talks about genocides and does not talk about cases that clearly don’t amount to genocide.
Stopping Anti-Semitism Goes Hand-in-Hand with Stopping Crime by Tal Fortgang with City Journal
Amid open support for terrorist groups on campuses and city streets, violence against Jews has risen once again. The latest piece of evidence is the New York Police Department’s 2024 hate crime data, which show a decline in prejudice-driven crimes overall but a seven-percentage-point increase in anti-Jewish crimes compared with 2023.
While Anti-Jewish hate crimes had been a plurality in past years, in 2024 they were a majority, accounting for 345 of 641 total hate crimes.
The anti-Jewish crimes tend to consist of petty violence, such as assaults, harassment, thefts, and vandalism. They're often perpetrated by individuals who know that Jews (especially easily identifiable Haredi Jews) are unlikely to defend themselves.
The criminals rarely face consequences. Hardly any of the crimes in the anti-Jewish-violence repertoire get prosecuted, and those that do increasingly result in diversionary-justice measures rather than prison time.
The criminals rarely face consequences. Hardly any of the crimes in the anti-Jewish-violence repertoire get prosecuted, and those that do increasingly result in diversionary-justice measures rather than prison time.
Violent streets are paved with good intentions. Weakness on crime is a form of kindness to the cruel. By going easy on those who prey on Jews, cities like New York become cruel to the kind.
Here in America, blessedly, we do not punish people for having evil thoughts—even anti-Semitic ones. That is an essential part of what has made this nation so special. But it does make addressing anti-Semitism, as an ideology or intuition, complicated as a matter of public policy.
Educational efforts to reduce anti-Semitism may succeed someday, but for now, we have little indication that anti-anti-Semitism training is anything better than counterproductive.
Link: Stopping Anti-Semitism Goes Hand-in-Hand with Stopping Crime
Department of Education launches antisemitism investigations into five universities by Marc Rod with Jewish Insider
The Department of Education is taking its first major action under the new administration to combat antisemitism, launching investigations into alleged antisemitic discrimination at Columbia University; the University of California, Berkeley; Portland State University; Northwestern University and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
“Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement.
Trainor said the announcements serve to put “universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses, nor will it stand by idly if universities fail to combat Jew hatred and the unlawful harassment and violence it animates.”
Kenneth Marcus, the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump administration, told JI that the investigations are “a big deal … every bit as important as the executive orders.”
“There’s a world of difference between simply waiting for complaints to pile up versus proactively announcing initiatives,” Marcus explained. “They’re viewed very differently within the higher education community and also among OCR investigators. When the secretary of education decides to highlight an issue by developing a proactive initiative, it sends a clear message that the department is prioritizing the matter.”
…administration’s choice of schools to investigate signals it will be scrutinizing both elite institutions with highly publicized antisemitism issues and less prominent ones such as Portland State and the University of Minnesota.
Link: Department of Education launches antisemitism investigations into five universities
New Yorkers Are Right to Demand a Ban on Criminal Masking by Hannah E. Meyers with City Journal
A poll published last week highlights the sharp divide between what New Yorkers want and what advocates demand. The survey found that 75 percent of New York voters support banning face-masking as a disguise to terrorize, hurt people, and commit crimes.
Two such bans, one Democratic and one Republican, are making their way through the state legislature—something Governor Kathy Hochul neglected to mention in her recent State of the State address.
Indeed, the public is smart to support mask bans. The rise in masking is associated with the nearly fourfold increase in U.S. anti-Semitism last year, and the tripling of incidences of anti-Jewish harassment in New York. Masking has also limited police officers, who struggle to identify and arrest masked offenders for infractions from hate crimes to carjacking. And anonymity has been shown to embolden offenders.
Masked protesters are also trickier to prosecute, as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg found out. Last spring, he dismissed for lack of evidence 31 of the 46 trespass arrestees who vandalized Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.
The reality is that mask bans prevent and respond to crime and harassment. They do not stop law-abiding citizens from masking for genuine reasons of health, religious observance, or revelry.
Link: New Yorkers Are Right to Demand a Ban on Criminal Masking
University of Michigan suspends pro-Palestinian group for 2 years by The Times of Israel
A pro-Palestinian group (Students Allied for Freedom and Equality) at the University of Michigan has been suspended for two years and will lose its funding in connection with protesters’ demands for divestiture from companies doing business with Israel.
Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, also known as SAFE, was accused of violating the university’s standards of conduct for recognized student organizations following a protest last spring outside a regent’s home and a demonstration without school permission on its Ann Arbor campus.
The group is also prohibited from reserving university spaces.
Link: University of Michigan suspends pro-Palestinian group for 2 years
Regular sources include JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, The Free Press, and the Times of Israel