Tag Archive for: terrorism

Pro-Palestinian Protestors and Pride Month Paraders Face ‘Progressive Standoff’

It’s officially June, which means the celebration of Pride has come out in full swing. Although Pride celebrations this year appear to be a bit more muted, many city streets are still cluttered with numerous festivals and parades rooted in the theme of “inclusion” and “acceptance” of all things gender and sexuality. However, even though such festivities are already rejected by countless Americans, this year the Pride displays seem to have been met with a new foe.

A “progressive standoff” ensued on Sunday as hundreds of LGBT paraders were confronted by hundreds of pro-Palestine protestors during the Philadelphia Pride Parade. The rainbow march was abruptly stopped when their path was blocked off by the anti-Israel crowd, who chanted phrases such as, “No Pride in genocide.” As reported by The Post Millennial, “Drag queens, trans folx, and Pride flag waving persons looked confused as they were unable to proceed down the parade route.”

Police were forced to break apart the two groups as they battled to claim the streets of Philadelphia. In a post on X, one bystander described the scene as “some kind of intersectional civil war.” And considering the somewhat unexpected nature of this controversy, Breitbart News pointed out, “The protest highlights a growing tension between segments of the Democrat Party base who believe that anti-Israel protests should take precedent over other causes like LGBTQ activism.” To that point, Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Strategic Engagement and Biblical Worldview, commented to The Washington Stand, “On one hand, it’s not unusual for a political tribe to have competing priorities.”

He continued, “There are lots of issues in the world, and it’s normal for people who agree in many ways to still have disagreements about tactics or priorities. But what makes this intramural conflict interesting is the awareness that their differences are not superficial.” As Backholm stated, “Many on the Gaza side of this conflict would literally kill the Pride side if they could.”

Interestingly, Backholm noted that while both sides “are united in their disdain for Christianity,” it’s “for totally different reasons.” For instance, he explained, “Palestinians hate Christianity because it allows so much personal freedom that the Pride folks are allowed to exist at all. The Pride team hates Christianity because it doesn’t celebrate what they choose to do with their freedom.”

Since June has only just begun, the question is: Will we see more of these standoffs? As far as Backholm is concerned, it’s entirely possible — especially since pro-Hamas college campus activism is predicted to go into the summer months, as TWS Senior Writer Joshua Arnold reported in May. “College semesters may be winding down, but the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations that have dominated the past month are not,” Arnold wrote, highlighting that not too long ago, Philadelphia saw new campus encampments pop up at Drexel University shortly before their summer term began — a school in close proximity to where last weekend’s events took place.

Regardless of how often these conflicting protests occur, Backholm said, “I suspect the Palestinian protests will always win,” given that, “in political standoffs, the more committed team virtually always wins.” He added, “The rainbow people will not endure actual pain for their cause, the Palestinian side will.”

Backholm predicted that we can also expect to see throughout the month the Left wrestling with how to handle problems of their own making. He expounded, “The challenge for the Left is that their worldview requires them to resolve conflicts by focusing on the identity of the people involved rather than the ideas involved.” He went on to say that “a critical theory framework” means whoever is more oppressed “has a greater right to be heard.” But in the case of Pride versus Palestine, “both the rainbow people and the Palestinian protestors are currently on the Mount Rushmore of oppression,” Backholm said, where “the Left doesn’t know who to listen to and who to ignore.”

From a biblical worldview, Backholm said, “Christians need to understand … that the ideas themselves are always more important than the group identity of the person speaking.” In other words, “We need to evaluate arguments based on how closely they align with truth, regardless of who is speaking, because everyone has the potential to be wrong and everyone has the potential to be right.”

He concluded, “Truth is what matters most,” so it would be wise for believers “to avoid silly games like this.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Pro-Palestine Protestors CLASH With Pride Marchers

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Fight Terrorism, Not Terrorists

Sounds absurd? Why? All kinds of well-meaning and not so well-meaning people who are alarmed with Islam Mayhem and Murder, Inc. have been proclaiming that their fight is with Islam and not with Muslims. Who knows what motivates these people and how their system of logic runs.

Geert Wilder says that his battle is with Islam, and he does not hate Muslims. No one, please, should take my criticism of Muslims as hating them. I certainly am critical of their belief and feel that Muslims must wake up to the destructive nature of their creed. The Muslims not only need to leave Islam, they owe themselves and the rest of humanity to actively work at putting an end to one of humanity’s most harmful dogmas.

In my thinking, Islam is the problem because there are Muslims who take its holy book, the Quran, as gospel and carry out its divisive and deadly provisions. Without Muslims, Muhammad’s Quran would be just another historic relic sitting on library shelves, next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, gathering dust, and criminals of the world would have to find other instruction manuals to guide their activities.

What good is it to burn the Quran or desecrate it? The fire from burning the Quran only energizes the already zany fanatical believers of Allah to further engage in their world-dismembering acts.

People who keep proclaiming that they have nothing against Islam but that their battle is with Muslim terrorists are an enigma. Perhaps these people are the politically correct, the delusional who rearrange reality to their fancy, or the naïve who are incapable of dealing with facts. These people are either incapable or do not want to see that it is the Muslims, the active jihadists, as well as their masses of supporters who are and remain culprits committing much of what is repugnant and harmful to civilized humanity.

If the fight is with Islam and not with Muslims, then in the interest of fairness, we must apply the same standards to other criminalities.

We should condemn arson, but not arsonists: Rape, not rapists: Theft, not thieves: Murder, not murderers; and all other forms of crimes, but not the people who commit them.

Terrorism has no external reality without terrorists. For as long as there are people who cling no matter how loosely or tightly to Islam, humanity, including Muslims, stands to suffer the consequences. Yet, sadly, many Muslims refuse to recognize the fact that it is their sickly belief system that is at the core of leading them astray and inflicting great harm to all.

It is foolish to wage battle against beliefs that promote mayhem and murder while giving a free pass to those who adhere to those beliefs and carry out their dogma.

“When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” Quran 8.12

I fully realize that not every Muslim is a card-carrying, hell-bent jihadist. Yet, by being a Muslim, the individual, willingly or unwillingly, directly or indirectly, empowers the zealot jihadist Muslims who live and die to further the cause of Islam.

In what way does your average peaceful Muslim support the work of the not-too-insignificant cadre of Islamist terrorists, you may ask? In multiple ways. For one, by paying his religiously required tax known as Khums (one-fifth of his income) to the imams and mullahs. What do the Islamic clerics do with the funds? They make a very good living by not breaking a sweat day and night, preaching hatred of non-Muslims, and training wave after wave of impressionable young as soldiers of Allah.

These clerical parasites are equal opportunity haters and promoters of violence. They do not limit their campaign to only non-Muslims. They even exhort their just too-happy jihadists to wage war against each other whenever it suits them, and they can get away with it.

Just look at what is happening these days in the lands of the religion of peace. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, and even the Islamic showcases such as Egypt and Turkey. Repression and slaughter are in full operation.

Syria’s in-power Alawites and their Shiite allies are engaged in the shocking butchery of the Sunnis, even under the eyes of the impotent United Nations observers. In one recent brutal attack by the Alawite forces of President Bashar Assad, some 90 people, including many children, were murdered.

I hardly need to tally the criminality and horrors of these Muslim-inspired regimes. Peace, tolerance, and respect for others are alien to the followers of Muhammad, no matter which sect they belong to and irrespective of where in the world they live. No sooner in power, in any place, they shamelessly and brutally begin their mayhem and murderous practices.

This primitive chauvinistic creed is custom-made for the savage male, where women are systematically abused in every imaginable way. Not only are women officially worth one-half of a man, but they are also to serve as a man’s property in the tragically ordained manner. Four women to a man in regular marriage and as many women as a man wishes in temporary marriages. Woe upon a woman who thinks of herself as an equal-rights human and violates these Islamic draconian laws. Honor killing awaits the fate of any woman who steps outside Islam’s misogynistic boundaries.

Give the ringleaders of this creed of violence credit. They have perfected their skills at their trade of spreading Islam, the means of making their parasitic living.

These so-called clerics make “good” use of the funds they extract from their followers. For one, they buy the ever-ready-for-purchase politicians to further their cause through legislation that would muzzle freedom of expression by any voice that dares to expose Islam for what it is.

For yet another, with their coffers flush with funds, the clerics enlist lawyers and launch lawsuits to destroy any person who speaks the truth about their barbaric beliefs and practices.

In addition, they honestly report intimidating businesses that fail to toe their line by boycotting their products and services. They force other businesses to withdraw their advertisements from any print or electronic medium that may honestly report the horrors of their beliefs.

Tolerance is a great social virtue that becomes a vice if extended to those who do not practice it and to criminals who take advantage of this noble human attribute. Muslims are the most oppressive and intolerant people in the world, and they justify their intolerance on the teachings of their holy book, the Quran.

The persecution of religious minorities in Islamic states is a legend. Yet, these very intolerant people come to the welcoming Western countries and demand one-sided tolerance from their hosts. Over time, these Muslims increased their demands to the point of aiming to subvert the civilized hosts and transform them into their failed savage system ruled by the Sharia Law.

Remember that Islam operates by stealth when not quite powerful, just as Muhammad did. Then, it gradually builds its power to the point that the soft approach is no longer necessary to subdue others and impose its will.

The stealth soft strategy is presently playing out in the United States. Islam’s tentacles are expanding into the body of this free and welcoming nation. In 2000, there were 1209 mosques in the United States of America. By 2010, the number has almost doubled. By 2021, the number had increased to 2769.

Islam is a bad idea, and Muslims are guilty of living by it and promoting it. Some Muslims take up arms, following the examples of Islam’s founder, Muhammad, in their aim to vanquish the non-Muslims. Other Muslims empower the frontline jihadists by supplying them with material support and manpower. In the same manner that an army can’t fight without the essential logistics supplied to them by civilians, the soldiers of Allah will be incapable of waging their death and destruction campaign without the support of the generality of Muslims. It is long overdue that Muslims be held accountable for the so-called religious belief that controls their actions: actions aimed at destroying anything and anyone non-Muslim.

It is imperative that we see reality and deal with it. No euphemism, no sugarcoating, no politically correct posturing. It is time to abandon all pretenses and place the blame where it belongs. It is the Mayhem and Murder Islam, Inc. that is breeding terrorists. Without Islam, there would be no Islamic terrorists.

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

As the ICC Fans ‘Pathetic Lies,’ Israeli Experts Say ‘We Were Gaslighted by [Biden] from the Outset’

The $300 million boondoggle known as the Gaza pier has been a floating flashpoint ever since President Joe Biden commissioned the project. Now, a few weeks into America’s buoyant humanitarian program, three U.S. soldiers have been injured (one critically) and most convoys of supplies and food have either been ambushed or looted by Hamas terrorists, never reaching its intended civilians.

To be fair, both parties had reservations about the idea, which they aired in a Senate Armed Services hearing back in March. “One of my concerns is security for this operation,” Delaware Democrat Chris Coons said at the time. “Because if the U.S. military is seen to be building and operating it, I think it puts it at greater risk.” On the opposite side of the Capitol, House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) pointed out that “nobody can answer who’s going to provide the security, who’s going to provide the drivers, and who’s going to load and unload stuff?”

Now, less than a month into the “solution” for suffering Gazans, the Biden administration’s insistence that Hamas — not Israel — control the operations there has become an absolute, taxpayer-funded disaster. “… [T]he United States has made it very clear to Israel that it doesn’t want Israel to control [Palestine], including the distribution of food,” Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate, told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “As a result, we had reports last week that Hamas has actually earned $500 million since the beginning of the war by selling the humanitarian aid that the international community insists that Israel be bringing into Gaza. So this entire thing in a way [is] humanitarian relief for Hamas,” she insisted.

“… [T]he United States spent $300 million … to build a pier in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid by sea. And none of the hundreds and hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid that has been brought to that pier has been delivered to anybody in Gaza,” Glick pointed out. … One convoy was commandeered by Hamas and just seized. And every other convoy comes under attack. So it’s all this pathetic lie.”

And it’s all feeding the anti-Israel anger that’s driving bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for crimes he’s not committing. “[There are the ICC’s] claims of starvation, which are untrue. … The claims of famine, which are untrue; the claim that Israel deliberately targets civilians for killing, which is untrue. All of these things are geared towards one goal. And that goal is for Israel to be forced to capitulate to international pressure and allow Hamas to survive,” Glick argued. “These are all demands that are being made, all allegations utterly false, that are being waged against Israel because the people who are waging them want Israel to lose this war.”

For all these claims, she pointed out, “There hasn’t been any documented evidence that anybody is starving in Gaza, except for the 128 hostages from Israel that Hamas kidnapped to Gaza on October 7th. So those are the only people we know for certain are starving. Most of the terrorists that Israel has arrested during the course of the war have been fat to obese,” Glick wanted people to know. “So we’re not seeing any privation in terms of food shortages among the members of Hamas that we’re seeing, and we don’t really see it among civilians. They just celebrated the Ramadan … their holiday for holy month. And there were no reported shortages of food for Ramadan. So all of this is just a fabrication, and it’s used in order to foment an Israeli defeat in this war. That’s what it’s all about.”

Perkins believes the entire narrative is being fanned by the ICC and international community to keep Israel from finishing the job against Hamas. It’s the “nefarious mix” of fake news, Glick said, that “all leads to this idea that there’s something criminal about Israel defending itself from the people who committed unspeakable atrocities on October 7th. And, you know, they started the war, they invaded, they massacred 1,200 people in the most sadistic way known to humanity in ways that nobody ever imagined before.”

And yet, she went on, “We were being gaslighted by the Biden administration from the outset. And talk of humanitarian crisis started a week after October 7th, when there was plentiful food and water inside of Gaza. So this is a deliberate fabrication to criminalize Israel and deny us the right to self-defense, much less the right to defeat our enemies. It’s very, very extraordinary.”

It’s escalated to such a point that “you have a prosecutor who has no jurisdiction over Israel … and now he wants to issue arrest warrants against a prime minister, our democratically-elected prime minister and our defense minister, for leading the country in a war for our national survival. … The Germans want to arrest the leader of the Jewish state for defending Israel against modern-day Nazis. That’s an unbelievable statement. And yet, here we are.”

Israel is a much stronger ally than Ukraine and certainly Afghanistan to the U.S., so “you would think we would actually work extra hard to make it easier for Israel,” Perkins pointed out, “but it looks like we’re working extra hard to make it difficult for Israel. And why?”

Incredibly, Glick said, the Biden administration is “unflappable” — even in the face of “the greatest atrocity that mankind has seen since World War II.” Even October’s horrors haven’t moved them “one millimeter from their conviction that the biggest problem is that there’s no State of Palestine for the very people who conducted these atrocities. Don’t forget,” she pointed out, “85% of the Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but in Judea and Samaria as well, support what happened on October 7th. Over 90% of Palestinians said that they are more proud to be Palestinians today than they ever were before October 7th. So these are the people that the White House thinks need to have a sovereign state.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden betrayal is unparalleled in history

RELATED VIDEO: Washington, D.C. Nakba March: “We want to defeat imperialism by Intifada”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Harvard Prevents Encampment Ringleaders from Graduating after U.S. House Investigation

The Harvard Corporation prevented 12 seniors from graduating Thursday for their involvement with the illegal protest encampment in support of the terrorist organization Hamas. The decision is a rare instance of campus anti-Semitic activists facing real consequences for their lawbreaking. It only came after significant congressional involvement.

To inflict these real consequences, the Harvard Corporation, which governs the school, made the decision to override their own faculty, in favor of preserving the integrity of “Harvard College’s disciplinary processes,” the university newspaper noted. At a regular meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is usually poorly attended, 115 Harvard faculty turned out to overwhelmingly vote in favor of shielding the anti-Israel protestors from all consequences, and allow the seniors to graduate anyways.

That vote came only three days after the Harvard College Administrative Board had placed 28 students on suspension or academic probation for their involvement with the disruptive pro-terror encampment.

In deciding to overrule the faculty vote, the Harvard Corporation explained that the faculty had simply ignored the Student Handbook, which requires students to be in good standing in order to graduate. “Today, we have voted to confer 1,539 degrees to Harvard College students in good standing,” wrote the corporation. “Because the students included as the result of Monday’s amendment are not in good standing, we cannot responsibly vote to award them degrees at this time.”

While granting that faculty have the right to determine appropriate disciplinary measures for students, Harvard Corporation argued that they didn’t do that. “We respect each faculty’s responsibility to determine appropriate discipline for its students,” they said. “Monday’s faculty vote did not, however, revisit these disciplinary rulings, did not purport to engage in the individualized assessment of each case that would ordinarily be required to do so, and, most importantly, did not claim to restore the students to good standing.”

In other words, the faculty did not argue that the students had not done anything worthy of discipline or that sufficient discipline had already been implemented. They simply declared that the protestors should be immune from the consequences of their actions because it was all for Palestine. It was a political power play.

Acquiescing to this power play would inject more injustice into Harvard’s disciplinary process, protested the corporation. They considered “the inequity of exempting a particular group of students who are not in good standing from established rules, while other seniors with similar status for matters unrelated to Monday’s faculty amendment would be unable to graduate.”

The Harvard Corporation seems to be taking a much harder line against the illegal excesses of pro-Hamas protestors than it did several months ago. This is the same governing board that issued a statement defending Harvard ex-President Claudine Gay before her sudden resignation in early January. Gay faced criticism for refusing before Congress to condemn calls for a genocide of Jews and for widespread plagiarism among her published academic portfolio.

More recently, Harvard executives continued to signal toleration for the anti-Semitic protest. Gay’s replacement, interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber, agreed on May 14 to reinstate suspended protestors and reevaluate the universities investments in exchange for them dismantling their encampment. Harvard University subsequently reinstated over 22 students.

However, the Harvard Corporation seems to have done an about-face after the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee released a report on Friday, which revealed the university had failed to implement the recommendations of its anti-Semitic task force.

House Republicans have held Harvard’s feet to the fire ever since Gay’s disgraceful December testimony, and apparently Harvard got tired of the scathing media attention. It’s relatively easy to defend the indefensible (failing to protect Jews or enforce campus rules) when no one asks any questions. But holding a giant spotlight over the misbehavior quickly makes it awkward for those tasked with defending it. In this case, it took just under a semester for the Harvard Corporation to decide they had had enough.

The Harvard Corporation can now expect to face “a faculty rebellion,” predicted (or promised?) Government Professor Steven Levitsky. An anti-Semitic campus activist group, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (whose name implies the Jews don’t deserve a state), also suggested the encampment might return, saying, “If Harvard won’t live up to their promises, we see no reason to live up to ours.”

The Harvard Corporation previously caved to pro-terror activists because it was afraid of the power of students and faculty. Its new willingness to brave their wrath suggests that it is now more afraid of the power of Congress to keep the spotlight on them if they continue to cave. Even if House Republicans can’t pass conservative legislation through a Democrat-controlled Senate or White House, their investigative power can still have an effect on the behavior of places like Harvard.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden ‘Doesn’t Care about Israel. He Doesn’t Care about Peace. All He Cares about Is Staying in Power’

The war against Hamas has had plenty of plot twists, but the last 48 hours have thrown an already chaotic international scene into even more uncertainty. Not only did Israel’s perpetual tormenter, President Ebrahim Raisi, die in an unexpected helicopter crash, but members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) are trying to arrest both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gazan leaders for “war crimes.”

The death of Raisi, who was aptly nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran,” comes just weeks after Iran launched its first open attack on the Jewish state. After firing 300 drone, ballistic, and cruise missiles toward the Israelis (99% of which were intercepted by a team of allies and the Iron Dome), Raisi claimed, “Iran’s armed forces taught a lesson to the Zionist enemy.” He warned of a “heavier and regrettable response” if Israel retaliated.

Without him at the helm, most experts don’t expect much change in the regime’s posturing — toward the Jewish state or the U.S. “I do not expect any sort of disruption in that field to the extent that it has to do with Iran’s actual support for Hamas and its positioning on the ground,” researcher Hamidreza Azizi told Newsweek. If anything, the Revolutionary Guard’s role could “potentially intensify,” Mideast Gulf Editor Nader Itayim explained on CNBC.

While European leaders expressed condolences, the first Army Green Beret in Congress had quite a different take. “Good riddance,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) posted. “Raisi was a murderous human rights abuser before and during his Presidency. But look for the Iranian regime to blame Israel and the U.S. for an assassination as another excuse to support terrorism.”

“It wasn’t us,” an anonymous Israeli official insisted to Reuters. “The message Israel is sending to the countries of the world is that Tel Aviv has nothing to do with the incident,” another said on his country’s Channel 13.

Meanwhile, the ICC is intent on charging Netanyahu with other crimes he hasn’t committed, including “intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population,” prosecutor Karim Khan said Monday in his formal request for warrants. ““Israel, like all States, has a right to take action to defend its population. That right, however, does not absolve Israel or any State of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and leaders of Hamas’s terrorist organization were also named.

Furious, War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz replied that “the State of Israel is waging one of the just wars fought in modern history following a reprehensible massacre perpetrated by terrorist Hamas on the 7th of October.” He went on, “While Israel fights with one of the strictest moral codes in history, while complying with international law and boasting a robust independent judiciary — drawing parallels between the leaders of a democratic country determined to defend itself from despicable terror to leaders of a bloodthirsty terror organization is a deep distortion of justice and blatant moral bankruptcy.”

Here in the U.S., outraged Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) cautioned the ICC from going forward with the threat. “I will feverishly work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle in both chambers to levy damning sanctions against the ICC” if they proceed, the South Carolinian warned.

“Most importantly, I want the world to know that I, along with my Republican and Democrat colleagues, and members of the Administration engaged the ICC on this issue weeks ago. We were told there would be discussions with Israel before any actions were taken. We stressed that the principle of ‘complementarity’ should be applied in this case. Complementarity requires the ICC to let the nation in question’s legal system move first before any action is taken by the Court.”

Graham said he was told that the investigation “would take months and not weeks, and that there would be meaningful consultation with the State of Israel. Instead of the ICC following through with scheduled consultations with Israel, they announced the warrants. I feel that I was lied to and that my colleagues were lied to. Prosecutor Khan is drunk with self-importance and has done a lot of damage to the peace process and to the ability to find a way forward. Lying prosecutors never bring about just outcomes.”

In the meantime, Hill conservatives and some Democrats are desperately working to get Israel the weapons they need — no thanks to Joe Biden. House leaders still can’t believe that the White House refuses to send munitions to the Jewish state and late last week, they passed the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to force the president’s hand.

“It’s disgraceful and it’s unlawful” to withhold that help from our allies, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Friday’s “Washington Watch.” “But here’s the situation,” he wanted people to know. “The president [is] reading his opinion polls and his radical left base that’s on these college campuses. … [T]hese aren’t your mom and dad’s Democrats. These are far-left anarchists and a very small minority. The president is so far down in the polls, they’re afraid they won’t even be able to bring those people to the table. So this is his [attempt to placate that anti-Semitic base].”

At the end of the day, Burchett pointed out, “He doesn’t care about Israel. He doesn’t care about peace. All he cares about is staying in power and keeping this group of anarchists that are running our country in the White House.” The idea that Congress has to pass a law “to make sure he follows a law that we already passed” is “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” he shook his head.

It’s “shameful,” Hice agreed. And the most absurd part of it all is that the administration is using these weapons as leverage to get Netanyahu to do what they want. “The Biden administration somehow is taking it upon themselves to micromanage a foreign war that’s being conducted by one of our allies.” Frankly, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) quipped, “If Biden had not been so obsessed with restricting Israel to appease his pro-Hamas base, the war likely would have been over by now.”

At the very least, Hice said, passing the bill to send arms to Israel at least shows the American people where the two parties stand. “We don’t support anarchists,” Burchett insisted, “we don’t support terrorists. Yet the Democrat[ic] Party apparently does.” So, if we want to fix this mess, the Tennessean argued, “the American people need to get to the polls. [In 2020,] 20 million so-called evangelical Christians decided to stay home. And that’s [one reason] we’ve got this disaster in the White House.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Bibi’s Plan for a Post-War Gaza

Biden ends the US-Israel alliance at a fortuitous moment

Pro-Hamas Campus Protests Spill into Summer, Arrests Pass 3,000

U.S. Churches Stand with Israel: ‘If Ever There Was a Time to Pray, It Is Now’

POST ON X: You have to see it to believe it: today, the UN lowered its flag in honor of Iran’s mass-murdering President and Foreign Minister. Unbelievable! 

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Footage Shows Gaza Terrorists Operating out of U.N. Compound

Terrorists in Rafah have been operating out of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) central compound, according to video footage the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released Tuesday. The footage contained “Hamas terrorists firing at civilians from within a UNRWA facility next to UN vehicles in Rafah,” described Foreign Minister Israel Katz, leading him to conclude, “UNRWA is an arm of the terrorist organization Hamas.”

There’s plenty of evidence pointing in that direction. “UNRWA is a U.N. agency that’s supposed to deliver aid,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on “Washington Watch” Thursday. But “they hire local folks to do it, and they’ve hired people that are really Hamas sympathizers. … We found tunnels under UNRWA’s headquarters. Now you’ve got video evidence of the compound being used for military purposes.”

In fact, Israeli intelligence revealed that more than a dozen UNRWA employees personally took part in Hamas’s brutal October 7 raid on Israel. The U.K.-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) had previously linked UNRWA to the October 7 violence by November 2023.

In addition to first-hand participation in terrorism, UNRWA also supports Gaza-based terrorist groups by funneling money and supplies to them, teaching their extremist ideology in UNRWA-run schools, and allowing terrorists to operate out of UNRWA facilities (the IDF carried out a precision strike Tuesday that killed 15 terrorists hiding in an UNRWA school).

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued that the entire U.N. is complicit in UNRWA’s support for terrorism because they have not acted to correct the misbehavior. After Israel revealed on Tuesday that terrorists were using UNRWA facilities, what the U.N. Security Council should have done was “meet and tell Hamas to quit using U.N. facilities to hide behind and facilitate their attack against Israeli troops,” said Perkins. That hasn’t happened because the U.N. is on the terrorists’ side.

Israel’s critics love to generate outrage by presenting only one side of the story, creating misleading headlines like, “Israel bombs UN school.” Those reading for headlines, or those reading to reinforce their anti-Semitic prejudice, might conclude from that headline that Israel murdered hundreds of defenseless Palestinian children — when in fact they killed 15 terrorists.

“If you came from Mars in the last two weeks, and you were watching international news, you would think Israel is just on a quest to kill all the Palestinians,” Graham exclaimed. But quite the opposite is true. “The reason so many Palestinians have been killed is Hamas wants them killed. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as human shields against Israel. They put weapons in mosques and schools and build command centers under hospitals, and they put their own people in harm’s way.” That’s why, Graham concluded, “There’s no substitute for victory here.”

An Israeli victory is one outcome the Biden administration is scrambling to prevent. Last week, after Congress passed a bipartisan package to send weapons to Israel, the Biden administration unilaterally decided to withhold that critical aid, on the theory that civilians might die. “Israel would stop killing anybody if Hamas surrendered. And, if Israel withdrew, Hamas would keep killing Jews,” Graham responded. “Understand: Hamas is the problem here. Give Israel the weapons they need to win the war they can’t afford to lose.”

“The answer is not to deprive Israel of weapons. They need to beat the terrorists. You don’t want to reward terrorists who put civilians in harm’s way by restricting the ability of the victim, Israel, to fight back,” Graham declared. “The weapons that we’re talking about are 2,000-pound bombs that can be converted into precision-guided munitions called JDAMs, and they’re necessary to get to the tunnels. You need a bomb that big to go down to where these cowards are hiding.”

“Joe Biden is basically trying to tell Israel, ‘Let me run the war for you,’” said Graham. “And here’s my response to Israel: say ‘no.’” He pointed out that the Biden administration is the same one that “withdrew from Afghanistan and still thought it was a good idea. They’re letting Russia run amok. … If I’m Israel, I’ve got to make these decisions” and not “let Biden and his team take over this war.”

“What right do we have to tell Israel how to fight their war?” Perkins queried in response. “It’s inexplicable what this administration is doing to our key ally, which is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.”

In fact, Perkins added, the Biden administration seems “to be more interested in helping their adversaries. The U.S. military anchored a temporary pier on Gaza’s coast.” The U.S. military began shipping supplies into Gaza via a floating pier on Friday. Graham professed skepticism about how the pier will be used. “Look at UNRWA,” he said. “How was it used? It’s a U.N. organization designed to help the Palestinians that was used to help Hamas.”

“Israel is in a world of hurt. Wherever they turn, there’s a radical Islamic group wanting to cut their throats. They’re in a fight for their life,” Graham urged. “What do you expect Israel to do? What is proportional? What is the right response when people want to destroy you and slaughter your family because of your religion? What’s the right response? I think the response is do what you have to do.”

“Israel was attacked viciously on October the 7th,” Graham continued. “Hamas wants to kill all the Jews. Hezbollah wants to kill all the Jews. The Ayatollah wants to wipe out the Jewish state. And, if you watch television, Israel is the bad guy. You can’t make this up.”

Israel’s enemies in the war are not only America’s enemies — including multiple, officially designated terrorist organizations — but also the enemies of the people of Gaza. It is Hamas putting Gazan civilians in harm’s way. Yet the Biden administration seems to believe these terrorist groups — our enemies — over Israel — our ally. Now the U.S. is directly shipping aid to Gaza, most of which will likely end up in the hands of terrorists, while we deny our ally the very munitions they need to avoid civilian casualties.

One would expect this perverse favoritism from the anti-Semitic U.N. But when did it come to characterize American foreign policy?

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Hamas terrorists’ introduction to an Israeli drone

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Israel Estimates ‘Approximately 1:1’ Civilian-Combatant Death Ratio in Gaza

More than 14,000 terrorist combatants have died in Gaza since October 7, compared to approximately 16,000 civilians, according to a new Israeli estimate released Monday. “We would expect everyone to now take these figures as a genuine estimate from a free democratic country that fights in strict accordance with the laws of armed conflict in one of the most challenging urban warfare scenarios in history,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded.

This estimate of civilian casualties is the first released by Israel and is far lower than the number claimed by the Hamas-controlled Gazan Health Ministry. Hamas — a U.S. designated terrorist organization with a history of making false claims — has likely manipulated the casualty figures as a propaganda weapon against Israel. Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman complained that the Jewish state has been “condemned globally because of a fake and fabricated civilian death toll created and disseminated by Hamas.”

Media organizations around the world have uncritically cited the Hamas-controlled death tolls — which were the only ones available — to produce reporting heavily biased against Israel and even charges of “genocide.” Many of these were the same media organizations who rushed to blame Israel when a Gaza hospital was supposedly bombed — only for time to reveal that a rocket fired at Israel by a Hamas-aligned terror group had misfired and landed in the hospital’s parking lot. Thus:

  • On April 15, The Intercept suggested the Gaza death toll of “more than 33,000, including at least 15,000 children” were “likely undercounts.”
  • On April 22, The New York Times stated the Gaza death toll was more than 34,000 “according to health officials there.”
  • On April 24, a shockingly slanted screed by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor claimed there were 42,510 dead, “38,621 of whom were civilians.” (That would leave 3,889 combatant casualties for a civilian-combatant casualty ratio of 10:1.)

On this point, The Guardian, a left-leaning, mainstream, British newspaper, was more responsible than many of its American counterparts. While citing Hamas’s death count of 34,000 in an April 20 report, The Guardian at least had the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the numbers are published by “health authorities under the Hamas-run Gaza government” and “do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas fighters.”

Hamas’s death count suffered a major loss of prestige last week when the United Nations (U.N.) abandoned its figure for the number of children killed in the Gaza war. (U.N. agencies are obviously no friends of Israel.) As recently as March, the U.N. Children’s Fund had recorded 13,450 children killed in Gaza, citing Hamas’s figures. Last Wednesday, however, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) updated the number of children killed in the Gaza war as of April 30 to 7,797 — a 42% decline.

Th U.N.’s new number is far more compatible with that released this week by Israel, indicating that Hamas’s death inflation may be growing too unrealistic for even the most anti-Israel organizations to believe.

Granted, “every civilian casualty is a tragedy,” as Netanyahu said this week. However, those casualties “would not have happened if Hamas hadn’t insisted on using their own people as human shields.”

“What Israel has done is take the effort to minimize civilian casualties as no other army has done,” Netanyahu argued. “We use leaflets, we use millions of text messages, phone calls. We actually call the people, give up the benefit of surprise, tell them: ‘Get out of the way. Get out of the war zone so that we can accomplish our military objectives while you’re in a safe place.’”

In fact, Israel’s civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is similar to or lower than that from many American military operations in the 21st century. Israeli strikes on terrorist targets have actually caused less collateral damage than, for instance, the 2008 Nineveh campaign in particular (2.4:1 civilian-to-military death ratio), or the entire 2003-2011 Iraq War in general (3.2:1 – 1.5:1). They have caused similar civilian casualties to the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul (1.2:1 – 1:1.8) and the 2001-2021 Afghanistan War (1:1.2), the latter of which was waged amid rural, mountainous terrain instead of in crowded cities.

Israel’s low civilian death toll is especially remarkable due to the high population density in Gaza and the fact that their enemies deliberately shelter among civilian populations to maximize the collateral damage. “In reality, Israel is setting the new gold standard for urban warfare with what appears to be the lowest civilian to combatant casualty ratios in history,” Hyman insisted.

Israel’s own military losses have risen to 620, Hyman said. Israel could likely prosecute the war with fewer of its own casualties if it didn’t place such a priority on protecting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, it has eliminated approximately 14,000 out of Hamas’s 35,000 terrorists, Netanyahu said. Many of the remaining terrorists are hiding behind one million Palestinian civilians in Rafah. The only way to end the war is for Israeli forces to move in and defeat Hamas, which will result in more civilian casualties. But, as the low casualty count shows, Israel is working to protect civilians, while the brutal international terror group is working to put them in harm’s way.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Dutch PM Geert Wilders: Netherlands will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

RELATED VIDEO:  Dr. Robert Katz on the bad and the ugly in America and the good news in Israel

POST ON X:

https://x.com/IDF/status/1791497077022683374

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘They Don’t Understand War’: Experts Slam Biden’s Denial of Arms to Israel

As stunned outrage escalated in reaction to President Joe Biden’s decision to halt arms shipments to Israel in the midst of its battle against the Hamas terrorist group, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that the Jewish state would “stand alone” and “fight with our fingernails” in the face of a lack of military aid.

“I hope that’s a senior moment,” remarked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in reaction to Biden’s announcement. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) stated that they were “appalled that the administration paused crucial arms shipments to Israel,” adding that “this disastrous policy decision was undertaken in secret and deliberately hidden from Congress and the American people.”

Democrats also expressed frustration with the decision. “As the leader of the free world, America cannot claim that its commitment to Israel is ‘iron-clad’ and then proceed to withhold aid from Israel,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) wrote. “The mixed messaging makes a mockery of our credibility as an ally. No one will take our word seriously.”

Meanwhile, ceasefire talks in Cairo between Israel and Hamas that were pushed by the U.S. stalled on Thursday, as Hamas continued its refusal to release 132 hostages, 38 of whom are believed to no longer be alive. As experts on the ground in Israel are pointing out, despite Hamas’s unprovoked October 7 attack that killed the most Jews since World War II and despite the unreleased hostages, the Biden administration has been undermining Israel’s military response for at least four months.

“Beginning in January, we started getting first reports that the Biden administration was slow walking munitions to Israel, including specifically ordnance for our aircraft and 155 millimeter artillery shells and tank shells,” explained Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate, on Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “So these are the basic tools of war that the Biden administration and the Obama administration convinced Israel we didn’t have to produce at home [because] the United States would be the steady supplier of all of these things.”

Glick went on to detail how the Biden administration went back on its word to give military aid to Israel.

“[T]hey double-crossed us, Speaker Johnson, and the House and Senate Republicans,” she underscored. “They … made aid for Israel contingent on aid for Ukraine, knowing full well that the Republicans opposed the aid for Ukraine. … [T]hat’s just the way the Democrats fly. They didn’t want to allow Israel to be a standalone legislation. They forced the Republicans’ hand. Speaker Johnson wanted to get the aid to Israel [and] he risked his position in his party in order to push it through with the aid for Ukraine. And then as soon as Biden got what he wanted from the Republicans specifically for Ukraine, he turned around and he double-crossed them and said, ‘Nope, we’re not giving Israel what they want.’”

Glick further described how the administration is setting expectations for how Israel should conduct its war against terrorists.

“[N]ow what he said is, ‘We’re willing to give Israel the means to intercept incoming projectiles from Iran or from Lebanon or from Gaza, but they may not cause Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, any of them, to pay any price for their aggression. All you can do is intercept incoming, but you can’t downgrade their power in any way. You cannot take the war to your enemies. They are allowed to attack you, and they will be completely immune from any sort of counter assault by Israel.’ That’s what the United States wants, and their long-term game is to transform Israel into a weak, totally dependent protectorate of the Democratic Party. … [I]t’s inviting the expansion of the war to other theaters in a major way.”

In addition, Glick enumerated how President Biden has personally inserted himself between Israel and other nations who have indicated their desire to provide military aid to the Jewish state. “[E]arly on [after October 7], the German chancellor came to Israel and met with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” she recounted. “And then after a series of conversations between the two leaders, the Germans agreed to sell us tank shells. … [T]wo hours after the announcement was made, President Biden was on the phone with Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and essentially push[ed] him to cancel the arms sale.”

The response within Israel has been to increase domestic production of munitions, Glick relayed. “[We’re] massively ramping up our domestic production. … [It’s] not productive enough to suit all of our needs, but we’re moving very quickly towards that goal. It will take a number of months, but we’re doing it. … They’ve opened up new lines of the Israel military industries in various cities around the country, and they’re hiring more and more employees to work the lines. … So we’re just going to have to build it ourselves as quickly as possible. We have to be the arsenal for our own democracy.”

Glick concluded by contending that the Biden administration is in over its head in its dealings with Israel’s war against terrorism. “U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration is … extremely shallow,” she argued. “[T]hey think that war is a game or some sort of graduate seminar that you can somehow or another resolve through all kinds of fancy ideas about deterrence and balance of power. They don’t understand war.”

“They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” Glick continued. “They attribute monstrous intentions through good people — the good people of Israel. And they project the goodness of the people of Israel on the monstrous enemies that are fighting us, whether it’s the Iranian regime that seeks our genocide through nuclear weapons and its terror proxy war, … or whether it’s Hamas. And we saw what they did on October 7th, and we understand what it means when they say that they want to kill [us]. [W]e see it with Hezbollah. … [W]e found dozens of subterranean tunnels over the years that they’ve dug into Israel from Lebanon with the goal of infiltrating our villages and capturing and slaughtering our people. So this is not a game.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a wing of Fatah: We participated in the October 7 attack

Biden makes common cause with Hamas

Nova October 7 Exhibit Reminds Us That Israel Is Fighting against Evil

Washington’s Betrayal of Israel Makes No Strategic or Moral Sense

University Protests Are Evidence of a Failed Education System

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

D.C. Finally Clears Pro-Hamas Encampment in President’s Backyard

General George Washington nearly lost the Revolutionary War because local political leaders refused to supply him with needed reinforcements. This past week, his namesake’s university nearly lost the Battle of Gaza Plaza for the same reason. Pro-Hamas demonstrators erected an encampment four blocks from the White House complex at George Washington University (GWU), where it remained for two weeks until Wednesday morning.

On Thursday, April 25, activists descended on GWU’s University Yard (U-Yard) to erect a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” or “Popular University for Gaza,” where stands a statue of George Washington.

“That encampment of these pro-Hamas anti-Semites was using the George Washington Statue as ground zero,” Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who witnessed the encampment firsthand on Tuesday, said on “Washington Watch.” “The statue of George Washington [was] covered in stickers that say, ‘Free Palestine. … A Palestinian flag replac[ed] the American flag” in Washington’s hand. “His head was covered in a keffiyeh. … A large whiteboard at the base of that statue … laid out the encampment rules.”

Of course, the American flag stands for freedom, limited government, and the rule of law, while the terrorist-controlled, autonomous regions of Palestine stand for religious extremism and anti-Semitism. Muslim Arabs enjoy freedom and rights in Israel, while the only Jews left alive in Gaza are Hamas’s hostages.

The activists further demonstrated their historical illiteracy by vandalizing the Washington statue’s base with “Genocidal Warmonger University” (for GWU) in red spray paint. Washington only ever fought defensive wars, usually against people of the same skin color — just like the modern nation of Israel.

In a refreshing contrast to the spinelessness of university administrators elsewhere, the GWU administration showed little tolerance for this unlawful form of activism. On April 25, they ordered the activists to disperse by 7 p.m. When the protestors refused to do so, the administration asked the D.C. Metro Police Department (MPD) to clear the encampment early Friday morning.

Then top city officials ordered MPD to stand down. MPD had assembled to clear then encampment at 3 a.m. on Friday when the police chief’s and mayor’s offices countermanded the operation. According to anonymous insiders contacted by The Washington Post, city leaders were “worried about the optics of moving against a small number of peaceful protesters.”

Without law enforcement reinforcements, GWU president Ellen Granberg did what she could with her own authority and suspended seven students who organized the protest.

Foresight could have predicted what hindsight proved — that GWU was right to want the protest shut down as soon as possible. The activist encampment — which included non-students from the beginning — quickly grew rowdier. On Day Two (April 26), it spilled out of U-Yard and took over the adjacent H Street NW. On Day Four (April 28), hundreds of activists stormed a police barricade and tore it down. On Day Eight, the protestors lowered the university flag and raised the Palestinian flag in its place.

While at the campus, Daines spoke with “a group of Jewish students who told me they were afraid to walk on campus. They’re scared just being in classes.”

Granberg skewered the MPD excuses days later:

“When protesters overrun barriers established to protect the community, vandalize a university statue and flag, surround and intimidate GW students with anti-Semitic images and hateful rhetoric, chase people out of a public yard based on their perceived beliefs, and ignore, degrade, and push GW Police Officers and university maintenance staff, the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive. All of these things have happened at GW in the last five days.”

Then Congress got involved. After seven days of tepid law enforcement, the House Oversight Committee summoned D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) and MPD commissioner Pamela Smith to explain themselves at a hearing scheduled for 1 p.m. on Wednesday.

Shortly after 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, MPD surrounded U-Yard, delivered three more warnings for activists to leave, and then moved in. More than a dozen activists refused to leave and were arrested. About a block away, a group of protestors rushed a barricade of police bikes, pushing against it and attempting to break through. The police responded to this physical aggression on the part of activists by deploying tear gas. All told, MPD arrested 33 activists.

After MPD cleared the encampment Wednesday morning, the hearing scheduled for that afternoon was canceled, Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced. “It was unfortunate the situation at GW forced the Oversight Committee to act; however it was apparent that the DC police force was not going to do their job,” he said. “I am pleased that the potential Oversight hearing led to swift action by Mayor Bowser and MPD Chief Smith.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) made a similar argument. “It should not require threatening to haul D.C.’s mayor before Congress to keep Jewish students at George Washington University safe.”

Obviously, city officials were never going to agree with this embarrassing interpretation of events. Bowser and Smith claimed they decided to clear the encampment because “the protest was becoming more volatile and less stable,” citing evidence that protestors were “casing” university buildings for a break-in and had “gathered improvised weapons” to accomplish a more resilient occupation.

This interpretation of events relies on the audience’s selective memory loss. The encampment was never legal; GWU suspended organizers for violating the student code of conduct in no less than nine different ways. As soon as the activists refused the first order to leave, they could rightfully be arrested for trespassing. Activists then escalated their lawbreaking on numerous occasions, including unlawfully occupying a city street, tearing down a police barricade, and intimidating Jewish students.

If these escalations did not precipitate a police response, it’s difficult to see what did trigger city officials to green-light clearing out the encampment, besides congressional action. The pro-Hamas activists were undoubtedly planning further escalations, as they have done elsewhere, but they hadn’t actually carried out their plans. If, as reported, city officials fretted over the “optics” of arresting “peaceful” protestors, nothing had happened that would change their calculus.

The only significant event that corresponds to the Wednesday morning clear-out is the Oversight Committee hearing scheduled for that afternoon. This changed the calculus for city officials by introducing a completely different set of “optics.” D.C.’s far-left electorate and media are far more skeptical of legitimate uses of police powers than ordinary Americans and their congressional representatives are.

The racially-tinged lenses of Marxism distort the circumstances. In reality, police are just doing their jobs to enforce laws passed by the popularly elected representatives of the people, while a small but stubborn group of activists seeks to defy those laws in increasingly disruptive ways. But Marxism makes the aggressive activists illegally camping on a university lawn and city street seem like courageous heroes fighting for revolutionary, generational change. Marxism also makes law enforcement officers who necessarily have to wear riot gear look like brutal agents of a reactionary, oppressive state. Actions that seem sensible within the parameters of this distorted reality look just as silly in real life as someone wearing a VR headset.

Many members of Congress do not wear the reality-defying glasses of Marxism. So city officials, whose job it is to govern in the real world, not an imaginary one, were embarrassed to defend their silly indulgence of Marxist fantasies from the skeptical questioning of the Oversight Committee’s skilled interrogators. Rather than face this eye-opening experience, they chose instead to order the encampment cleared.

Further indicating that the Wednesday morning clear-out was a policy change, rather than a consistent response to changing circumstances, is the criticism it drew from those still viewing the world through the lens of Marxism. “Less than 10 hours ago, I was pepper sprayed and assaulted by police,” who “destroyed a beautiful community space that was all about love,” complained one Palestinian GWU student. He insisted they were punished “because we decided to pitch some tents, hold community activities and learn from each other. We built something incredible. We built something game-changing.”

No, the United States of America is something incredible. The U.S. Constitution — which replaced the unworkable articles that so hampered General Washington — was game-changing. American civil society is virtuous not because it is “all about love” but because it creates an even playing field with fair and just rules — unlike this supposedly loving community united by hatred of Jews. Those who built this country risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor; those who want to tear it down insist they should risk nothing. Fortunately, we live in the real world, not Marxism’s optical illusion.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘A Post-Religious America’ Helped Spark Anti-Semitism in Schools, Experts Say

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Senator: Biden’s Pressure Campaign against Israel Is Aiding Hamas

On Tuesday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began advancing into Rafah, the last remaining stronghold of the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza, gaining operational control of the Rafah Crossing on the Gazan side in a “precise counterterrorism operation,” according to an IDF statement. The operation comes at an extremely fraught time for the Jewish state, as reports emerge about a disputed ceasefire agreement by Hamas, the Biden administration withholding vital munition shipments to aid Israel’s fight for survival, and the deaths of four IDF soldiers at the hands of terrorist mortar fire.

Reports surfaced Monday indicating that Hamas had “accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal,” but Israel indicated that the proposal “is far from meeting Israel’s core demands.” As Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) observed during Monday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Hamas appears to be taking its cues from the wavering support of Israel by the Biden administration.

“Unfortunately, Joe Biden and Democrats and gullible liberals all across the world have too often fallen for Hamas’s PR info operations,” he noted. “… The one term that Hamas insists upon is that Hamas gets to continue to operate and control Gaza. And there’s widespread agreement inside of Israel, understandably so after the October 7th atrocities, that Hamas must be destroyed. … Hamas was ready to finally sit down and negotiate a deal to release some, if not all, hostages, but they became gradually more stubborn over the last three weeks as Joe Biden yet again began to put more pressure on Israel [and] threatening to withhold ammunition, which they apparently finally did last week, and condemning Israel’s intention to go into Rafah.”

Cotton continued, “Hamas can see all this, and they know that if they just hold [on to] what they’ve got and don’t agree to any kind of ceasefire that involves concessions on their side, Joe Biden may still give them what they want. So where is Hamas’s incentive to release any of these hostages? As long as Joe Biden is putting more pressure on Israel than he is on Hamas, they don’t have much incentive.”

Biden’s pressure campaign against Israel can likely be explained by the continued shrinking support for the Jewish state happening within the Democratic Party. As CNN reported Tuesday, “[O]ver twice as many Republican as Democratic voters now say they sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, a much bigger gap between the parties than earlier in this century, according to Gallup Organization polling.”

As Cotton went on to discuss, that pressure manifested on Monday as the Biden administration refused to approve the shipment of precision bombs to Israel in order to “send a political message” to the Jewish state. The action marks the first time the Biden administration has delayed a weapons sale to Israel since the October 7 Hamas atrocities.

“[I]t may be the worst foreign policy blunder yet of this president’s failed tenure, even worse than the withdrawal from Afghanistan,” remarked the junior senator from Arkansas. “Because while it’s bad enough to try to verbally or rhetorically restrain Israel, it’s much worse to deny it the ammunition it needs in the middle of a shooting war of its own survival. And if they are denying Israel with ammunition resupply, they’re almost surely signaling that to Hamas as well, which just encourages Hamas to dig in and wait out Israel and not release a single hostage.”

Cotton further emphasized that “none of this would be happening if Hamas had not committed the worst atrocity against Jews since World War II. And it could all end today, very simply, if Hamas would release all the hostages and surrender unconditionally. That’s what happens to losers in war, and Hamas started a war that it cannot possibly win militarily.”

In response to those who argue that Israel’s war against Hamas will never succeed because its Islamist ideology can never be destroyed, Cotton pointed out that destroying terrorist infrastructure and taking out terrorist leadership can go a long way.

“[W]hat you can destroy is all of the leaders of Hamas and all of its soldiers and all of its infrastructure, just like we did to the Islamic State under President Trump,” the senator underscored. “And yes, there are still people who subscribe to the Islamic State or Hamas’s hateful ideology, but they don’t control territory the size of Indiana anymore. That’s what Israel can do [and] what it must do. Otherwise, the message that not only Hamas will get, but Hezbollah and Iran, is, ‘We can attack Israel and we can wait out their counterattacks and count on Democrats and Europeans to put enough pressure on Israel that they will ultimately stand down.’”

However, Cotton concluded, “If Israel destroys Hamas, they will get the opposite lesson. And all those Arab nations who have been quietly, or in some cases openly helping Israel will see, ‘We bet on the right horse here.’ Israel is tough and strong and will defend itself, and therefore they will help us defend ourselves against Iran and these terror groups.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Day Before Biden Admin Announced It Would Withhold Weapons From Israel, It Issued Sanctions Waiver To Allow Arms Sales to Qatar and Lebanon

Biden Faces Pressure At Home As Israel Begins Rafah Operation

Biden’s double game on Hamas should fool no one

No ‘New Definition’ in Anti-Semitism Bill, Says Law Professor

The people setting America on fire

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Journalist: Left-Wing Donors Manipulating Students into Campus Protests

In light of recent news that Democrat mega-donors are bankrolling pro-Palestine protests and encampments on college and university campuses, one expert is warning that this is a case of the Left manipulating students.

On Monday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins commented of the ongoing protests, “They kind of all look the same. They have all these indicators of a well-funded, highly coordinated effort.” He continued, “Well, recent reporting has revealed that student groups organizing the protests have received financial backing from many of the largest funders of Democratic election campaigns, including top donors of President Joe Biden’s reelection bid.”

Cheryl Chumley, writer and online opinion editor at The Washington Times, told Perkins, “A lot of people have kept their eyes on how the funding is flowing into some of these student groups, and really it’s your usual suspects.” She explained, “George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — formerly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — had some ties to this, too, though they’ve said that they’ve pulled out of funding certain groups that are now funding these pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests.”

She continued, “Susan and Nick Pritzker — they are the heirs of the Hyatt hotel chain — and they not only have their hands in this funding of these groups, but have donated to Joe Biden’s campaign just a couple of years ago to the tune of $300,000.” Chumley added, “So if you start looking at some of these curious ties, there really does seem to be very many links between the funders of these anti-Semitic displays and the Democratic Party.”

Previously, Chumley wrote for The Washington Times on the ties between Democratic Party mega-donors and the funding fueling protests and encampments across college and university campuses. Referring to the anti-Israel and pro-Palestine nature of the protests, Chumley wrote, “But with Democrats — with Biden — it’s clear: They can’t speak too loudly against Jew hatred because too many of their political campaign funders are simultaneously funding the Jew hatred.”

“If you’re looking at whether these protests are just springing up based on student concerns for the poor Palestinian civilians, then I would have to disagree with that,” Chumley commented to Perkins. “I would have to say that it appears to me that this is yet another leftist-type strategy to take advantage of the ignorance of youth that have been purposely dumbed down by Democrats in the public school system for years.” She added, “And now they are using these youthful protesters on college campuses to advance a political agenda that is very anti-Semitic at root.” Chumley explained further:

“But the bigger theme here, the bigger issue that we need to concern ourselves with is: why this is taking place? And it’s not so much about [an] Israel and anti-Israel agenda, which is part and parcel of it. But the bigger idea is to tear down America, to divide and conquer, which is sort of the Democratic Party playbook that we’ve seen since Barack Obama’s day, since the Democratic Party took a turn from being the pro-America, blue-collar working party to really one that is filled with Marxists and communists and collectivists and those who hate America. And one way that they can tear down America from within is to create chaos, division, and violent outbursts.”

Perkins observed that recent polling has shown that the conflict between Israel and Hamas is rated as the lowest issue of importance or concern among American college students. A recent Generation Lab survey found that only 13% of college students named “The conflict in the Middle East” in their top three issues of concern. In comments to The Washington Stand, Perkins explained, “The Left is getting a great return for their investment in these political protests.  A few million dollars and they are getting hundreds of millions in media air time to cover up the failures of the Biden administration.”

As Chumley noted, protests on college campuses are being funded primarily by two organizations: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros and previously received funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Jewish Voice for Peace is also supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Pritzkers have funded other pro-Palestine organizations involved in campus protests. All the bankrollers are major Democratic Party donors and have contributed to Biden’s 2020 campaign, his 2024 reelection effort, or both.

According to The Wall Street Journal, campus protestors at Columbia University previously consulted with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), former Black Panthers, and other veteran protestors and activists before launching their own protests. NSJP has reportedly been encouraging campus protests since October, when Israel first responded to attacks by Palestine-based Hamas forces. Sueda Polat, a Columbia University graduate student and one of the organizers of the campus protest, explained that students also learned about orchestrating protests from participating in Black Lives Matter events in 2020. At other universities, some pro-Palestine encampments have actually set up “self-defense teams.”

In her remarks to Perkins, Chumley observed, “It’s really time to turn back to God in this nation because we are fighting so many battles in the political realm right now. And if we see these youth emerging to be America’s next leaders, we are in deep, deep trouble and we need God more than ever.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: The people setting America on fire

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

More Than 1,600 Pro-Hamas Activists at 33 Schools Arrested Since Gaza Encampments Began

College campuses escalated their efforts to root out pro-Hamas occupations on Tuesday, with police arresting more than 430 people on nine different college campuses. Police have made more than 1,600 arrests in connection with the disruptive, illegal campus occupations since the first one began at Columbia University on April 19, according to an investigation by The Washington Stand. Disturbingly, some universities are beginning to cave to protestors’ demands to restore order to campus, even as campus protests become increasingly dominated by non-students.

The sheer number of campus protests and arrests can be a bit bewildering to keep track of them all. As of Wednesday, there were at least 1,641 arrests and counting at 33 colleges and universities in 23 states, with at least three more schools threatening to make arrests and more pro-Hamas encampments cropping up daily.

Since so much media coverage obscures this point, it bears repeating that universities have not called in police to arrest protestors simply for exercising their right to free speech, or even for the vile, anti-Semitic content of that speech. After asking law enforcement to intervene on two separate occasions, the University of Texas at Austin on Monday issued this representative statement: “Protests are allowed at the University of Texas. Since October and prior to April 24, no fewer than 13 pro-Palestinian free speech events were held on the UT campus, and four more demonstrations have been held since Thursday, largely without incident.”

No, protestors were arrested for deliberately breaking the rules: flouting curfews, setting up tents where no tents were allowed, intimidating other students and impeding their free access and education on campus, and defying orders from law enforcement. In some instances, protestors broke into campus buildings and then barricaded them against campus authorities, declaring that the buildings had been “liberated.” Thus, when protestors were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest, they had no one to blame but themselves.

If anything, universities have been reluctant to arrest demonstrators, often waiting days before calling in police, repeatedly pleading with the lawless mob before authorizing arrests, and only arresting a fraction of those involved in the illegal encampments. Thus, the 40 incidents in which campus demonstrators have been arrested represent only the small fraction of anti-Semitic activity on college campuses that has been met by a law enforcement response. With that said, here is a timeline of campus arrests since April 19:

Friday, April 19:

  • 108 activists were arrested at Columbia University after erecting a pre-dawn tent encampment. Several were suspended. Several student organizers were briefly suspended, including Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) daughter. However, the encampment returned on April 21.

Monday, April 22:

  • 133 activists were arrested at New York University after a large group, including non-students, illegally crossed police barricades.
  • 48 activists were arrested at Yale University, where pro-Hamas demonstrators intimidated Jewish students and struck one in the eye. The activists resisted a lawful order to disperse.
  • Three activists were arrested at California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt) in a scuffle with police after protestors illegally occupied a campus academic building and barricaded it against police.

Tuesday, April 23:

  • Nine activists were arrested at the University of Minnesota when police cleared another encampment at the Minneapolis campus.
  • Two activists were arrested at the University of South Carolina for creating a disturbance after hours and then refusing a lawful order to disperse.

Wednesday, April 24:

  • 93 activists were arrested at the University of Southern California as police cleared an encampment there. Activists, including many who were not students, struggled against police, at one point surrounding a police vehicle until the police let someone they had arrested go free.
  • 57 activists were arrested at the University of Texas at Austin after they refused to disperse and attempted to unlawfully erect an encampment there. Nearly half (26) of those arrested were not affiliated with the university. The progressive local prosecutor subsequently dropped all charges against those arrested.

Thursday, April 25:

  • 108 activists were arrested at Emerson College in Boston when police cleared an illegal encampment.
  • 36 activists were arrested at Ohio State University when police cleared an illegal encampment. Only 16 of those arrested were students, while 20 were not affiliated with the university.
  • 33 activists were arrested at Indiana University at Bloomington when police cleared an illegal encampment.
  • 28 activists were arrested at Emory University in Atlanta when police cleared an illegal encampment.
  • Two activists were arrested at Princeton University when police arrived to clear an illegal encampment. After the police began making arrests, the rest of the occupiers voluntarily packed up their tents to avoid arrest.
  • One activist, a grad student, was arrested at the University of Connecticut for assaulting an officer who was attempting to detain another student.

Friday, April 26:

  • 44 activists were arrested at the Auraria Higher Education Center, where activists had illegally occupied campus buildings and damaged campus property. Auraria serves as a campus for the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the University of Colorado Denver.
  • Three activists were arrested at Arizona State University in connection with an illegal encampment that would not be cleared until the next day.
  • Two activists were arrested at the University of Illinois when police cleared an illegal encampment. The two men, who were not students, were charged with “mob action” along with obstructing a peace officer for one aggravated battery to a peace officer for the other.

Saturday, April 27:

  • 100 activists were arrested at the University of Washington, St. Louis when police cleared an illegal encampment. (This number seems suspiciously round, but efforts to obtain a more precise total bore no fruit; therefore, I will proceed as if this was the total.) Among those arrested were 23 students and four school employees, leaving approximately 73 people not affiliated with the school. Jill Stein, 2024 presidential candidate for the Green Party, was one of those arrested.
  • 98 activists were arrested at Northeastern University in Boston at a demonstration that evidently crossed some lines. The demonstration was “infiltrated by professional organizers,” according to a school spokeswoman, which led the school to shut it down. Anyone who could produce a valid school ID card was not arrested. Among the 98 protestors who could not, 29 were students, and six were school employees, leaving 63 people not affiliated with the school.
  • 69 activists were arrested at Arizona State University when police cleared an illegal encampment. Of the 72 total people arrested at ASU between Friday and Saturday, only 15 were students, meaning that 57 were unaffiliated with the school.
  • 12 activists were arrested at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. when police cleared an illegal encampment and they refused to leave. The university expressed safety concerns over unaffiliated individuals joining the demonstration. Of those arrested, nine were students, and three were unaffiliated with the school.

Sunday, April 28:

  • Two activists were arrested at the University of Pittsburgh for illegally trespassing on a lawn.

Monday, April 29:

  • 82 activists were arrested at Virginia Tech University after students illegally occupied a lawn. Fifty-three of those arrested were students, leaving 29 who were not affiliated with the school.
  • 79 activists were arrested at the University of Texas at Austin after they again attempted to erect an illegal encampment. Only 34 of those arrested were students, while 45 were not affiliated with the school.
  • 20 activists were arrested at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland after students illegally erected tents during a protest.
  • 19 activists were arrested at the University of Utah when police cleared an illegal encampment. Four students, one school employee, and 14 unaffiliated individuals were among those arrested.
  • 16 activists were arrested at the University of Georgia when police cleared an illegal encampment. Those arrested included 11 students and five unaffiliated individuals. The university subsequently suspended some of those arrested. “Personally, I did not expect to be suspended,” complained one suspended student, Zeena Mohamed. College is supposed to be a place where students learn new things, after all.
  • 13 activists were arrested at Princeton after protestors illegally occupied a campus building.
  • 13 activists were arrested at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond when police cleared an illegal encampment. While six were students, seven were not affiliated with the school.
  • Six students were arrested at Tulane University in connection with an illegal encampment. Only one was a student; the other five were not affiliated with the university.
  • Three activists were arrested at the University of South Florida when the Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held an unauthorized rally. The school’s SDS chapter had been suspended for causing a disruption on campus at a previous event.

Tuesday, April 30:

  • 173 activists were arrested at the City College in New York (CCNY) when police were called due to “specific and repeated acts of violence and vandalism.” Both students and “un-affiliated external individuals” refused to leave. The New York Police Department cleared CCNY around the same time that they cleared protestors at Columbia University for the second time.
  • 119 activists were arrested at Columbia University. Activists had illegally occupied the campus for more than a week, causing the campus to be closed. They recently broke into and barricaded a campus building, which they renamed and declared to be “liberated.” Police used a large truck to enter the building through a second-floor window.
  • 36 activists were arrested at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after they refused to obey a lawful order to disperse. The demonstrators had taken down an American flag and replaced it with a Palestinian flag. Of those arrested, 13 were students, and 23 were not affiliated with the university.
  • 32 activists were arrested at Cal Poly Humboldt after they had illegally occupied a campus building for more than a week. Those arrested included 13 students, one faculty member, and 18 unaffiliated individuals.
  • 25 activists were arrested at the University of Connecticut when police cleared an illegal encampment.
  • 16 activists were arrested at the University of New Mexico after they illegally occupied a campus building. Five of those arrested were students, while 11 of them were not affiliated with the university.
  • 14 activists were arrested at Tulane University when police cleared an illegal encampment. Two of those arrested were students, while 12 of them were not affiliated with the university.
  • 10 activists were arrested at the University of South Florida after the SDS, a suspended student group, tried to stage another illegal encampment. Seventy-five to 100 protestors came equipped with wooden shields and umbrellas in an attempt to counter law enforcement’s anti-riot tactics, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
  • Nine activists were arrested at the University of Florida when police cleared an illegal encampment. One person was charged with battery to a police officer.

Wednesday, May 1:

  • 34 activists were arrested at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when police cleared an illegal encampment. Four of the demonstrators were charged with resisting arrest and/or battery to a police officer.
  • Activists were arrested overnight at the University of Arizona when police cleared an illegal encampment. At publishing time, it was not known how many activists were arrested.

There are several noteworthy trends in this progression: 1) universities are acting more quickly to disperse illegal encampments; 2) more universities are calling in police to make arrests; 3) the numbers of those arrested is dwindling; and 4) increasing attention is being drawn to the presence of outside agitators.

These trends suggest a number of developments. First, university administrators are watching what is happening at other universities. They are witnessing the recalcitrance of pro-Hamas activists, as well as the headaches and monetary damages they have caused at places like Columbia or Cal Poly Humboldt where they were not dealt with quickly. They have also witnessed the example of the University of Texas at Austin and other schools that have successfully prevented a campus occupation through vigilant policing. These factors motivate university administrators to put an end to the illegal occupation tactics.

Second, the force of the pro-Hamas wave has dwindled as it has expanded. Protests at elite, radically progressive schools had high energy and significant student involvement. But protests at smaller or less elite schools have seen less student enthusiasm. Arrests have been in higher numbers, and there has been a larger proportion of unaffiliated agitators.

Third, even the most radical protestors can behave rationally. Essentially, they would rather not face consequences for their actions — to the point that they are now begging for amnesty from the same administrators they just poked in the eye. It seems that students are making a risk calculation based upon how they believe law enforcement will respond. Police have made the most arrests in progressive (that is, anti-law-enforcement) jurisdictions such as New York, Massachusetts, and California. But protests have been smaller across the South and Midwest, suggesting that fewer students are willing to risk arrest and prosecution for the thrill of camping on the university lawn. This suggests that government officials should consider the incentives they create in how they respond to protests.

Fourth, outside agitators have become involved to an alarming extent. Police made arrests at 22 universities from Saturday to Tuesday; and, in 11 out of 12 instances where the numbers are known, they arrested more outsiders than students. In multiple instances, these outside agitators even participated in illegally occupying campus buildings. It is unacceptable that a handful of activists, with no connection to a university, can seize its property and hold it hostage to absurd demands.

Circumstances on many universities are developing rapidly, and more arrests could follow at any time. Johns Hopkins University has threatened police action against an illegal encampment on its Baltimore campus. Purdue University has threatened ringleaders of an illegal encampment there with disciplinary action. Portland State University in Oregon has closed its campus due to protestors illegally occupying the campus library for two straight days.

As these will not be the last campus arrests related to pro-Hamas protests, neither were they the first. At Brown University, 41 students were arrested in December when they refused to leave a campus building. In March, four students at Vanderbilt University and 22 students and two faculty at Cornell University were also arrested for refusing to leave campus buildings.

But pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic protests on campus exploded in mid-April around Passover. The illegal occupation at Columbia gained the most attention, and campus occupations have expanded ever since. But the activists have gone too far, and universities are fighting back with mass arrests, which have now reached more than 1,600 and counting.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Governor Ron DeSantis: Florida’s not running daycare centers at universities

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Left-Wing Donors Gave More than $3.3 Million to Pro-Hamas Activities since 2016

With tent cities springing up across American campuses, filled with anti-Semitic activists who are openly supporting U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, you could be forgiven for suspecting that this activism was not wholly organic. And you would be right.

Fingerprints of Further Funding

Take the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, where “students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens,” according to the New York Post. That is not the sort of event a campus student association organizes on its semesterly stipend — certainly not the sort of event a student association could sustain for now more than a week.

It’s not just Columbia University. These tent encampments — with an odd near-uniformity to their pup tents — have popped up at dozens of campuses all across the country. Dozens, scores, and hundreds of students have walked out of classes only weeks before finals, and they are glamping on the lawn instead of cramming in the library. Who is behind all this?

Paid Activists

The Post discovered that at least some encampments appear to be coordinated by paid activists. A left-wing activist coalition called the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) sponsors a “Youth Organizing Fellowship” that offers college students an unheard-of $24-$28/hour wage to organize supposedly “local campaigns,” which are really backed by the training, mentorship, and ongoing support of this extremely well-funded activist network. In 2023, USCPR hired eight youth fellows, three of which have recently appeared at pro-Hamas encampments at UC Berkeley, Yale, and UT Austin, according to photographs sleuthed out by the Post.

Those who visit the USCPR website today will not find any youth fellows listed. The activist group “has just begun a new class of 2024 youth fellows,” they conveniently claim. Instead, they suggest repeatedly, “Check back for more information,” which innocently suggests to viewers they haven’t had time to update their website yet. However, according to their advertisement, applications for the position closed on April 3, just over two weeks before the recent mayhem on university campuses began.

On one hand, this could be mere coincidence. On the other hand, it could be that USCPR youth fellows (nothing said they had to only hire eight this year) have played a major role in organizing these campus encampments, at least the more influential ones. If that is the case, then USCPR deliberately timed its hiring so that its website would reveal no information about its youth fellows until after their encampment campaign — perhaps even after the semester. Given the presence of former USCPR youth fellows — who, presumably, are no longer on their payroll — at these protests, it seems likely that their current youth fellows would also be involved, simply due to running in the same circles of protest culture.

The USCPR Network

The USCPR coalition includes Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), CODEPINK, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), and the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC), among many other groups. In 2021, USCPR had a total income of $1.5 million total expenses of $1 million.

USCPR’s official name is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Under that name, USCPR received $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund between 2018-2023, and it received $700,000 from the Soros family’s Open Society Foundation between 2018-2022 (the most recent years for which data is available).

In 2018, Tablet Magazine reported that USCPR was “the fiscal sponsor of a group called the Palestinian BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] National Committee (BNC),” which in turn was linked to Palestinian terrorist groups. One of BNC’s members, listed on its website, is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine (PNIF). Five members of PNIF are U.S.-designated terrorist organizations: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad the Palestine Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Popular Front — General Command (PFLP-GC).

For those like me who have never run across the term before, fiscal sponsorship is where one nonprofit receives and administers donations intended for another organization that lacks nonprofit status. (The National Council of Nonprofits argues that the practice does have a place in helping new charities get started, but to the uninitiated outsider this arrangement also looks like a legal way to launder money.) Remember this term, because it will reoccur below.

Local chapters of USCPR affiliate SJP organized many of the Gaza encampments, including those at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, Ohio State, and Emory. Also involved in the Columbia occupation is JVP, another USCPR affiliate that co-organized an October 2023 protest in which demonstrators illegally entered a House office building and were arrested.

However, USCPR is not the only source of funding for organizations within its orbit organizing campus occupations. From 2017-2022, Soros’s Open Society contributed $775,000 directly to JVP, while the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave the group $490,000 from 2019-2023.

Financial information on SJP is harder to obtain because the organization is not registered as a nonprofit. Another USCPR member, WESPAC, serves as SJP’s fiscal sponsor. It makes sense that SJP, which declared Hamas’s October 7 terror attack to be “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” would wish to conceal its funding streams. It also makes sense that SJP would not wish to register as a nonprofit organization, since that designation might be justly removed based on its activities and statements. Hence, it’s secretive funding mechanisms.

Headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. in Westchester County, the Westchester Peace Action Committee seems like a small, local nonprofit — at first. Nevertheless, WESPAC plays an inconspicuous but important role in supporting the national anti-Israel movement. It does this by allowing itself to be used as a fiscal sponsor to fringe extremist groups that might otherwise lose their tax-exempt status. According to the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, WESPAC has fiscally sponsored 22 organizations since 2000, but 15 of those organizations were anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, with no more than one organization in any other category

Due to the lack of reporting requirements, it is unknown how much money WESPAC has funneled to SJP. What is known is that the organization’s revenue nearly quadrupled over four years, from $636,000 in 2021 to nearly $2.4 million in 2023. The sources of most of that revenue are not known.

Tip of the Iceberg

The organization of pro-Hamas campus encampments suggest they are being bankrolled by someone with deep pockets. The lavish supplies expended on the encampments suggest they are being bankrolled by someone with deep pockets. The high compensation paid activists receive to coordinate these encampments suggest they are being bankrolled by someone with deep pockets.

According to open-source data gathering, at least two left-wing grant-making organizations with deep pockets — the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations — are known to have made significant past donations to several of the groups involved in these protests.

However, the activist groups already mentioned are not the only members of the left-wing coalition organizing anti-Semitic direct action on and off university campuses, nor are they the only ones rolling in left-wing donations. Other radical groups have cooperated in staging anti-Semitic demonstrations:

  • If Not Now (INN) received $400,000 from Open Society in 2019-2021;
  • Adalah Justice Project received $550,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (passed through the left-wing Tides Center) in 2020-2023;
  • The Arab American Association of New York received $60,000 from Open Society in 2018;
  • Desis Rising Up and Moving received $30,000 from Open Society in 2020.

All these groups have participated in anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests.

For those keeping track, the organizations sponsoring campus encampments and other anti-Semitic protests have received at least $3.36 million since 2016 from just two left-wing organizations. Meanwhile, the funding sources for other groups, such as the hyper-active SJP and Within Our Lifetime, are not known. This is based upon previously reported data that does not even account for funding these organizations may have received since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack — when the lawlessness began in earnest.

Campus protestors like to romanticize their misbehavior by comparing it to the protests of the late-1960s. But today’s protestors have access to more funding than their comrades of another era — perhaps “professors” would be a more efficient word — could have dreamed of. There are likely many deluded campuses today who deeply believe in their confused and perverted vision of the world.

Yet the amount of money involved suggests the campus occupation movement may not be as widespread a grassroots-uprising as the left-wing media is laboring to make it appear. Millions, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, can buy significant cooperation from one of the most notoriously penniless segments of society. This is perhaps especially true when the money enables agitators to utter college students’ two favorite words: “free food.”

The Left seems to believe rowdy, disruptive chanting can drive any policy change — so long as the rioters yell loud enough and long enough — and powerful progressive organizations have pulled out their pocketbooks to put that theory to the most rigorous test.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Violent Anti-Israel Encampments ‘Can’t Be Allowed under First Amendment,’ Congressman Says

Brigitte Gabriel shares her horrifying story of living under the radical Islamic ‘Palestinians’

BBC Documentary ‘Nika’s Last Breath’ about 16-year old Nika Shakarami’s last moments before being raped and murdered in Iran

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Campus Encampments Only a Warm-Up for Summer of Protests

Illegal campus occupations have entered their second week while hapless administrators at supposedly elite universities squirm like four-year-olds trying to gain control of a runaway tractor. The protests “don’t appear to be dying down at all,” Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice noted on “Washington Watch” Friday. As finals and then elections loom, “many people are asking and wondering if the violence is going to spill over into the summer months.”

“These protests are going to continue into the summer,” answered Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) in the same interview. “And, as it gets hotter, and tempers flare, the potential for more disruption is evident. And it’s going to be very unsettling as the summer goes on.” The campus encampments are “just uncovering the truth,” he added, “which is that the radical Left — supported by and endorsed by terrorist groups around the world — are doing what they can to stoke unrest across the country.”

The cause doesn’t matter to left-wing direct action. Sometimes, the activists don’t even know what the cause is. “I’ve seen interviews with students chanting, ‘From the river to the sea,’ and [they] don’t even know what river or what sea they’re talking about,” said Cline. A viral video clip showed two college students at an NYU protest last week who admitted they didn’t know what they were protesting. “Any student in late April is generally looking for any pretext to get out of class,” suggested Owen Strachan, senior fellow for Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, on “Washington Watch.”

Whatever the cause, the Left has cultivated a culture of protest, where students and others gather simply for the excitement, the thrill of sticking it to the man, the rush of power from inhibiting other people’s lives, or the feeling of invincibility reinforced by the inexplicable reluctance of law enforcement agencies to enforce the laws these protestors break.

The protest counter-culture has been growing for some time. As early as 2011, protestors cut their teeth at illegal encampments during Occupy Wall Street. From April 2016 to February 2017, protestors camped out in the Dakotas to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In 2020, left-wing activists inflated a single incident of bad policing into a nationwide summer of racial division. The BLM movement perpetrated more than 500 violent riots, causing $1 to $2 billion in damages. The well-organized and relentless rioters staged nearly-nightly standoffs with law enforcement at the Portland, Ore. federal courthouse, the White House, and in New York City — not to mention other cities.

Since late 2021, left-wing activists participating in “Stop Cop City” have camped out near Atlanta, seeking to prevent the construction of a police training facility. In March 2023, Atlanta police detained dozens of activists, including a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) after more than 100 masked individuals in black clothing “entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers,” ultimately vandalizing and destroying construction equipment. Later that year, local officials indicted 61 individuals on racketeering charges.

The violence continued in 2022, when left-wing activists resorted to violence and intimidation in support of abortion-on-demand. The militant leftists not only targeted the homes of Supreme Court justices but even churches, academic appearances by constitutional lawyers, and everything in between.

This lifestyle of protest has created a need to protest, which in turn creates a demand for overhyped controversies. “Whether it’s environmental rhetoric or whether it’s international support for Hamas,” Cline pointed out, “we’ve seen a liberal indoctrination of college students and young people.” The education system is “being abused by the Left to infiltrate and indoctrinate young minds.”

One of the key words there is “young.” Left-wing radicals have even created summer camps to indoctrinate 4th through 8th graders into their activist lifestyle, teaching them the sort of escalatory tactics that necessitates instruction about how to deal with tear gas.

Now, as other causes apparently lose their luster, college activists with far more zeal than knowledge have happily adopted the cause of anti-Semitism as their reason to get out of bed in the morning — or perhaps I should say, get out of their pup tents.

Commentators on both sides of the political aisle have drawn comparisons between the student protests taking place today and anti-war protests from the late-1960s. At Columbia University, students appear to be consciously reenacting a university occupation that took place there in 1968. Establishment Democrats, having selected Chicago for their 2024 convention, have expressed concerns that this summer could see a repeat of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when young radicals clashed violently with police. The summer riots of 1968 prompted disturbed Americans to elect Republican Richard Nixon that fall on a platform of restoring law and order.

Conservatives have also drawn the connection. “This reminds us of 1968 and the anti-war protesters. They were violent, violent extremists. They called for the violent overthrow of the United States government,” Regent University Dean of Government Michele Bachmann said on “Washington Watch.” Once again, she said, “We’re seeing calls for the overthrow of the United States government when they call for ‘death to America,’ ‘death to Israel.’”

The parallels to riots of the 1960s are more than superficial, suggested Rabbi Yaakov Menken on “Washington Watch.” “These folks who were students with … the long haircuts and the bandanas are now professors, tenured professors, in some cases even deans of students.” In other words, the student rioters of the 1960s are now the ones teaching university students today. Is it any wonder that they taught their proteges to follow in their footsteps?

“Hopefully they go back to class,” Cline said about the protestors, “and then go get jobs for the summer because … it would avoid the kind of summer unrest that we saw across the country in 2020.” Cline added that he hopes “cooler heads prevail.” If they don’t, Americans could be in for a “long, hot summer” of protesting and riots.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The ivory tower jihad

The campus crucible of Islamic holy war

Not Just Colleges, but Mayors Abandoned Jewish Students to Hamas Rioters

Using the Anti-Klan Act to Address Campus Antisemitism

The Ivy League Radical Spring

‘Now is the time for choosing’ by Caroline Glick

RELATED VIDEO: Eva Vlaardingerbroek: On the State of Europe speaking at CPAC Hungary

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Roughly Half of Gen Z Voters ‘Are Sympathetic to Hamas’

Last weekend, multiple anti-Semitic protests broke out on college campuses including Ohio State University, Columbia University, and Yale University. The demonstrators tore down American flags, chanted about the death of Israelis and praises of the October 7 attacks, as well as some injuries and arrests. Ever since the war between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas broke out, intense targeting of Jews in the U.S. sparked as well.

Initially, people questioned whether the anti-Semitism was new or simply uncovered by the Hamas terrorist attack. But now, as more protests occur, many worry that colleges have become a breeding ground for not only leftist agendas at large, but also for much of this resurgence of Jewish hatred. Considering the amount of anti-Semitism displayed on college campuses in recent months, the news that a survey found roughly half of Gen Z voters “are sympathetic toward Hamas” is, for many, not a shock.

Summit Ministries and RMG Research released data on Monday showcasing “the startling difference between the sentiments of all voters and Gen Z voters specifically, those born between 1997 and 2012,” Breitbart reported. These particular results, which involved 1,003 registered voters, highlighted Gen Z’s terrorist sympathies with the label, “Landmark poll: Gen Z sides with Hamas.”

The respondents were asked, “Do you believe that Israel’s wealth and military power make its campaign against Hamas unjust?” According to Breitbart, “While most voters across the board, 58 percent, believe that Israel’s campaign is ‘just’ — compared to 21 percent who believe it is unjust — only 42 percent of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is just. A plurality of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is unjust,” Breitbart reported. This is despite the fact that roughly 60% of Gen Z voters “agree with the U.S. government classifying Hamas as a terrorist group.”

The survey also revealed that “one-third of Gen Z voters believe Israel does not have the right to exist as a nation. Across the board, just ten percent hold that same sentiment, showcasing the radicalization of America’s youth.” Comparatively, a Pew Research Poll from March found “roughly six in ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid,” even if they did not all agree with how Israel responded to Hamas.

However, even though the majority of the U.S. voters appear to side with Israel amid the war, the poll from Monday made it unmistakenly clear that almost the majority of young voters do not.

Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared with The Washington Stand, “When colleges and even primary and secondary schools are educating their students in the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ paradigm, it’s little wonder that Gen Z will identify with Hamas as indigenous and believe that Israel is a ‘colonizing’ force.”

She continued, “We know that this is totally and biblically inaccurate, but this is a generation that has been formed by social media very profoundly where these ideas are pervasive.” As such, it leads to “a situation where there is very little downside for being a pro-Palestine protestor on a college campus in most states,” especially considering the fact that “universities have policies where they provide the police force and the court system to meet their need for (social) justice.”

Unfortunately, Kilgannon concluded, “this horrific situation is sadly not surprising.”

 

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

WATCH Biden Praise AOC’s Vile Defense of Violent Anti-Jewish Pogroms on University Campuses

Columbia President’s on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

Expel and Deport Ivy League Terrorists

Columbia University: Protestors Call Jews ‘Pigs’ As Qur’an Says

RELATED PODCAST: The Struggle Between Liberty and Authority

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.