Najlepszym sposobem na powstrzymanie Chin przed atakiem na Tajwan jest pokonanie Rosji w Europie. Jak powiedziała w tym miesiącu była prezydent Tajwanu Tsai Ing-wen: “Ukraińskie zwycięstwo będzie najskuteczniejszym środkiem odstraszającym przed przyszłą agresją”. Na zdjęciu: Tajwańczycy na marszu poparcia dla Ukrainy w Tajpej 13 marca 2022 r. (Zdjęcie: Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

Tajwan: przetrwanie Ukrainy jest naszym przetrwaniem

Gordon G. Chang

Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Australian PM Blames Antisemitism for Arson Attack on Melbourne Synagogue, Manhunt Underway for Suspects

Algemeiner Staff

Arsonists heavily damaged the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, on Dec. 6, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

German University Cancels Lecture by Israeli Historian Benny Morris Due to Student Protests, ‘Security Concerns’

Algemeiner Staff

Israeli historian Benny Morris in 2024. Photo: Screenshot

The University of Leipzig in Germany has canceled a lecture by Israeli historian Benny Morris following student protests described by the school as “understandable, but frightening in nature.”

Morris, one of Israel’s leading public intellectuals, was scheduled to deliver a lecture about extremism and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in which the Jewish state secured its independence, at the university on Thursday as part of a lecture series on antisemitism.

However, the school released a statement this past Friday announcing that it had canceled the planned event, citing protests over the lecture and what it described as security concerns.

“Our invitation to Prof. Morris was motivated by the desire to talk about his earlier work, which has had a profound impact on historical research,” the university said in its statement. “Unfortunately, Prof. Morris has recently expressed views in interviews and discussions that can be read as offensive and even racist. This has led to understandable, but frightening in nature, protests from individual student groups.”

The University of Leipzig did not elaborate on any specific comments by Morris, whose works include the seminal study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, first published in 1988, and made a point of noting it did not endorse the historian’s views.

“In principle, inviting speakers to the university does not necessarily mean that we agree with their views, and we firmly distance ourselves from Prof. Morris’ controversial statements,” the school said. “The purpose of the event with him was to engage critically, not to endorse his theses or later statements. In our opinion, science thrives through the exchange of diverse ideas, including those that are challenging or uncomfortable. We trust that our students are able to engage constructively and critically with the guest speaker.”

Various groups including Students for Palestine Leipzig had called for the lecture to be canceled, arguing Morris — who has expressed political opinions associated with both the left and the right — held “deeply racist” views against Palestinians.

“Together with security concerns, the above points mean that Prof. Benny Morris’ lecture will not take place,” the university stated.

Morris, 75, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the decision to cancel the lecture was “disgraceful, especially since it resulted from fear of potential violence by students. It is sheer cowardice and appeasement.”

The groups protesting Morris pointed to comments he made in a 2004 interview in which he said that “in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime … When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy … when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide — the annihilation of your people — I prefer ethnic cleansing.”

Morris, a former professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, also said that “something like a cage has to be built for” the Palestinians.

“I know that sounds terrible,” he continued. “It is really cruel. But there’s no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”

The historian explained to Haaretz that those comments were made 20 years ago during the second intifada, or violent Palestinian uprising, “when terrorists were bombing buses and restaurants in Israel almost daily.”

“The word ‘cage’ that I used was indeed inappropriate, but my intention was correct — the need to place the Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza behind fences so they could not enter and explode in Israeli cities,” he said. “Israel eventually did so, and it ended the phenomenon of mass killings by suicide bombers. Perhaps today, the word ‘cage’ might very well be fitting for the Hamas murderers and their enthusiastic supporters.”

In an interview with The Algemeiner earlier this year, Morris argued that, while he “disliked” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he agreed with the premier’s policy of waging war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

“He’s right that the war should continue until Hamas is crushed, if only because around the region, we will be seen as losers if we don’t complete the job,” Morris said.

Despite canceling Morris’ lecture, the University of Leipzig expressed concern about the increased efforts to boycott and marginalize Israeli scholars because they are from the world’s lone Jewish state.

“Regardless of this case, we want to express our concern that a double standard is being established that is being applied to Israeli scholars, who are increasingly marginalized and excluded from events under the pretext of political differences of opinion, while other voices are given unhindered access to the university,” the university said. “This applies, for example, in Leipzig to events by colleagues who are close to the BDS movement, which is classified as a suspected extremist case in Germany. We are far from establishing a culture of cancellations, but the possibility should remain open to be able to discuss difficult and critical voices from both sides in a tough manner.”

The Algemeiner has reported extensively on wide-ranging efforts across academia to exclude Israeli scholars and institutions in accordance with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.

America’s future depends on Trump’s promise to punish woke universities

Jonathan S. Tobin

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Mullett Arena on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, Ariz. on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Ash Ponders for “The Washington Post” via Getty Images.

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But for many observers, the context for the agreement was not so much a belated interest by one school to address the wrongs suffered by its Jewish students. Rather, it was the fact that it came a few weeks after the election victory of Donald Trump. As one headline in a news article about the settlement put it, “College settles antisemitism claims before Trump can make good on accreditation threats.”

Trump repeatedly made clear during the 2024 election campaign that the educational establishment would be as much a target for his second administration as the denizens of the Washington “swamp” such as the liberal-dominated federal bureaucracy that did so much to sabotage and obstruct his first four years in the White House.

More will hinge, however, on whether he makes good on this promise than the fate of school administrators or even the safety of Jewish students.

Trump’s war on woke

The president-elect vowed to punish colleges and universities that tolerated not just the sort of antisemitism that went on at Occidental and so many other schools. He’s also determined to rid American higher education of the plague of “woke” ideology. That’s a term that refers to the way left-wing ideologues have conquered academia and imposed toxic ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality that divide humanity into two permanently warring groups of “white” oppressors and “people of color” who are their victims. The left’s long march through U.S. institutions—and that includes the arts, corporate America and government—has involved the indoctrination of a generation of students in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that trashes equal opportunity (the opposite of “equity”) and includes only certain approved minorities while excluding everyone else, including minorities like Jews.

Seen in that context, antisemitism is just one aspect of the broad damage that the adoption of this new secular religion by those in charge of education has been doing to America. It’s also fueling a surge in racial divisiveness and a war on the canon of Western civilization that is the foundation of a society grounded in the rule of law, which made America a great nation as well as one that was particularly hospitable to religious minorities.

That means the stakes involved in whether or not Trump keeps his vow to reform education and to turn the antisemites out are as important as any involving his second-term agenda. It represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse the left’s conquest of academia. If he and/or his appointees falter in their resolve, the consequences for the country as a whole and for Jews will be incalculable.

But as the coverage of the issue in liberal legacy corporate media like The New York Times and The Guardian indicates, the educational establishment and their allies on the political left and the press are determined to oppose Trump’s goals. They have already begun a campaign to obfuscate the issue and demonize efforts to roll back the woke orthodoxy as part of what they routinely and falsely describe as the next administration’s putative authoritarian putsch. The truth is just the opposite since the real authoritarians are the bureaucrats and “educators” who have been imposing their distorted neo-Marxist vision on the country while also fomenting and enabling a new wave of antisemitism.

Ironically, the legal settlement with Occidental, which was celebrated by both the ADL and the Brandeis Institute as a victory in the effort to push back against campus antisemitism, was an indication of just how feeble the effort to counteract woke antisemitism has been up until now.

The agreement involved some elements that are necessary such as efforts to train school administrators to be more aware of antisemitism and to take into account the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism when dealing with instances of Jew-hatred.

But the lawyerly document Occidental signed leaves plenty of leeway for it to evade responsibility for future violations. It can be defended as probably as much as could be achieved in such a negotiation at this point in time.

Title VI antisemitism complaints to the U.S. Department of Education—the primary mode of carrying on the fight against this scourge in recent years—involves a lengthy process that has, to date, never resulted in any real punishment for even the most egregious violators of the rights of Jewish students. Stripping a university of its federal funding—something that is a given for any institution that engaged in open discrimination against African-Americans or Hispanics—is the sole remedy that could, if fully implemented, mean a much-needed fundamental change in the way American higher education operates.

And as long as schools retain their woke administrators and faculty, as well as curricula that discard traditional standards and help fuel antisemitism, agreements like the one with Occidental are almost certain to fail to create the kind of change that is needed.

Draining the swamp

That is why Trump’s scorched-earth approach is so necessary, even as it is being denounced by the same people who are responsible for creating or perpetuating the current mess as too extreme or even needed at all.

Trump’s stated intention of “draining the swamp” throughout the federal government is being depicted as evidence of his supposed authoritarian impulses and racism. But this is exactly the sort of argument based on a high-handed dismissal of genuine concerns and problems that have caused so many Americans to lose faith both in our educational system and in Washington.

His threats can seem crude to those accustomed to politicians being guarded in their remarks. Yet the events of the last few years—starting with the moral panic about race behind the Black Lives Matter riots and then on to the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism—demonstrated that a restrained “business as usual” approach won’t cut it when the collapse of our most cherished institutions is at stake. Their transformation into purveyors of neo-Marxist indoctrination and toxic ideas that enable hatred for both the West and Jews is a crisis of enormous proportions. It is happening at both the college and graduate levels, as well as in K-12 schools where leftist teachers’ unions have also imposed the indoctrination of critical race theory.

The only reasonable response to this disaster is exactly the kind of tough-minded purge that Trump has envisioned. And far from this being an uninformed or extreme approach, Trump and his transition team are consulting with experts like Christopher Rufo, author of an authoritative and essential book on the woke plague—America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything—and incorporating the ideas of “Project Esther,” a serious plan for dealing with campus antisemitism produced by The Heritage Foundation.

All of this has produced panic on the left and even among mainstream liberals who have been conditioned by partisan political rhetoric to believe that Trump is a second Hitler. They worry that he is already going too far in seeking accountability for institutions that engage in racial discrimination and tolerate antisemitism under the guise of DEI “anti-racist” policies, believing that somehow this will destroy academic freedom. What his critics fail to recognize is that American education is already enduring a catastrophic transformation that has silenced dissent against woke doctrines that seek to trash the Western canon.

A necessary sledgehammer

The only way to fix it is with the same sort of Trumpian sledgehammer that tossed aside failed ideas about the Middle East in his first term that enabled him, among other important policy changes, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and forge the Abraham Accords. If that means executive orders reversing President Joe Biden’s DEI orders that created woke commissars in every federal agency and department, that should be welcomed. If it means closing the largely useless and counter-productive Department of Education and enacting far-reaching reforms that will defund institutions clinging to discriminatory ideas and actions, then that should be cheered by those who cherish the values of equal opportunity, merit and zero tolerance for hatred and discrimination.

More to the point, it will mean that policing antisemitism on campus will be shifted away from the ineffectual Title VI complaints to federal education bureaucrats to a campaign of lawsuits conducted not just by groups like the Deborah Project, valuable though they may be, but by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with all of the vast resources at its command. In this manner, a message can be sent that will likely motivate the vast majority of college administrations to discard DEI and the tolerance of hate for Jews that accompanies it.

It is impossible to know whether the new administration will succeed. But rather than worrying that he is the wrong instrument to carry out this effort or wasting time decrying his rhetoric, it’s likely that only an outlier like Trump could contemplate such a bold project or have the will to see it to its logical end. Indeed, so grave is the threat that DEI and other leftist ideas pose to the country’s future that anything short of what he has discussed would be inadequate. Instead of expressing horror at his determination to enact real change, fair-minded Americans of all faiths and in both major political parties should be rooting for him to keep his word and to do everything he promised to punish colleges and universities, in addition to any other entity that promotes the sort of woke hate that has made life for Jewish students and anyone else who dissents against the new secular orthodoxy so difficult.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

Israel tells JNS it’s looking into timing after it pays UN $17.6m on day of ICC warrants

Mike Wagenheim

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Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the United Nations secretary-general, briefs reporters at U.N. headquarters on Oct. 9, 2023. Credit: Paulo Filgueiras/U.N. Photo.

The Israeli mission to the United Nations told JNS that it is looking into the timing of its $17.6 million payment of its U.N. dues for the year on Thursday—the same day that the International Criminal Court announced arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister.

In so doing, Israel became the 147th of 193 U.N. member states to pay its 2024 dues.

JNS asked Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, at the global body’s press briefing on Thursday if the Jewish state’s dues payment came via automatic deposit.

“If our friend, the comptroller, had automatic access to the bank accounts of 193 countries, I can tell you we would not be in the liquidity crisis that we are in,” Dujarric told JNS. “Every country pays its dues when it’s able to, when it chooses to.”

The International Criminal Court, which is based in The Hague, is a stand-alone body that is not part of the United Nations.

The court issued the arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and former minister in part over allegations that the Jewish state instituted a policy of starvation of Gazan civilians amid its war against Hamas.

U.N. officials have repeated assessments repeatedly in the past year from the  U.N.-aligned Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which has projected and warned of ongoing famine.

The projections were all subsequently revisited, either revised internally or discredited by the IPC Review Committee.

Much of the data came from the United Nations. For months, Israeli officials have protested that the global body was not reflecting food deliveries into Gaza by outside groups or the private sector in its statistics, which the Jewish state says paints a more dire picture of Gaza where no starvation exists.

To date, the only known malnutrition deaths in Gaza are linked to pre-existing conditions and there is no publicly available evidence of mass starvation.

Karim Khan, The Hague court’s prosecutor, cited the IPC assessments specifically to justify, he said, charges of deliberate Israeli starvation of Gazans.

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‘Not here to arrest people’

Dujarric said at the press briefing that the U.N. secretary-general “respects the work and the independence of the International Criminal Court.”

Despite a long-standing U.N. rule that bars contact between the global body’s officials and those subject to arrest warrants, Dujarric said that Guterres will remain in contact with Netanyahu under an exception, which allows for dealing with “fundamental issues, operational issues and our ability to carry out our mandates, including vital matters of security.”

That issue appears moot for the time being, as Netanyahu has declined to take calls from Guterres since October 2023, after the U.N. secretary-general appeared to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks by claiming that it didn’t occur “in a vacuum.”

The remarks drew condemnation across the Israeli political spectrum, triggering an immediate and harsh deterioration in Israeli-U.N. relations. Last month, Israel Katz, then-Israel’s foreign minister, declared Guterres persona non grata.

A reporter asked Dujarric if Netanyahu would be welcome at future events at the General Assembly, given the United Nations maintains its own security force. “They’re here to keep us safe, to keep the building safe,” the U.N. spokesman said. “They’re not here to arrest people.”

JNS asked Dujarric about media reports that Netanyahu met with government and military officials recently to develop a plan to have a private company take over food distribution in Gaza under Israel Defense Forces protection to try to mitigate massive looting.

Dujarric said he was unaware that the United Nations had been briefed on it.

“We continue to feel that the best way to improve the humanitarian situation of Palestinians is to do it through the international community, the humanitarian operations as they are, including with increased safety and security for them, as well as a big role for the private sector to get the economy going,” he said.

He added that the United Nations couldn’t say if it would cooperate with a private or military Israeli aid delivery program “until we’ve seen something on paper, officially.”

The United Nations has criticized the Jewish state repeatedly for, it says, failing to secure distribution routes and to protect humanitarian convoys in Gaza.

Dujarric said earlier this week that the United Nations does “not accept protection from any warring party,” as it would be “pretty obvious that we would be an even greater target if we were surrounded by armed soldiers from one of the two parties during this conflict.”