We were talking about YOU and and once again, you avoid providing a direct reply to a challenge. You change the topic from you forging posts to Zionism.
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Pro Hamas in the west - and their adventures
- Thread starter mandrill
- Start date
Terrorists with terrorist flags in the Sheppard and Bathurst area harassing jews that live in the area
Not much different than people marching in front of the white house with Hezbollah flags and praising Hamas' armed wing.
NYC protesters wave terror group flags, call for intifada outside Nova massacre exhibit
Demonstrators light flares, carry signs glorifying October 7 Hamas attack and chant slogans justifying killing Israeli civilians as part of 'Day of Rage for Gaza' in Manhattan
www.timesofisrael.com
Pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah protesters cheer ‘jihad’ at anti-Israel rally in DC
Demonstrators near White House protest Gaza war in terror group attire, burn US flags; in London, thousands march against Israel amid chants of 'From the river to the sea'
www.timesofisrael.com
Jewish students need to stop hiding from the enemy and start confronting the terrorism-promoting students and paid anti-Israel operatives on their campuses.
Congrats, you've made Yemen, Hezbollah and Hamas more popular than your zionist nazi crowd.
MESSAGE TO LAW STUDENTS: HOW DARE YOU.
The Establishment Suppresses Dissent
Meanwhile The Carnage Continues
EDUCATIONThe letter and the law
When war erupted in Gaza, some TMU law students signed an incendiary petition criticizing Israel. Then came the backlash – and an existential crisis about their school’s mission
ROBYN DOOLITTLETHE GLOBE AND MAILPUBLISHED JUNE 15, 2024
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This is one of the people who, last October, signed a petition at Toronto Metropolitan University declaring ‘unequivocal support’ for Palestinians and urging the Lincoln Alexander School of Law to publicly follow suit. The Globe interviewed about a dozen signatories, many of whom have received death threats.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
When a new law school in Toronto opened its doors in September, 2020, its brochure promised an unapologetically “progressive” legal education.
Ryerson Law, as it was then called, embraced diversity, equity and inclusion. Technology would be central. The curriculum included professional placements, so students would graduate ready to be working lawyers. At its core, this new school – soon to be renamed the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University – promised to change the status quo.
“We are ready to engage with the most challenging legal issues of our time,” dean Donna Young, the only Black woman leading one of Canada’s 24 law schools, said at the launch ceremony.
Three years later, those tenets were put to the test with the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, during which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 taken hostage. Amidst the immediate outpouring of international support for Israel, student activists at Lincoln Alexander worried that a history of Palestinian suffering was being overlooked.
Given the school’s founding principles, they urged their administration to speak out – and break with the conventional wisdom that universities should keep quiet on political matters. Similar demands were being made on universities across Canada and the United States. Lincoln Alexander refused, and as the days went by, tensions grew on campus.
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Smoke from an Israeli rocket rises over the northern Gaza Strip in October, when Hamas attacks on nearby Israeli towns provoked an even deadlier response.JACK GUEZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
On Friday, Oct. 20, the students sent the dean a petition calling on Lincoln Alexander to drop its “neutral” position.
The letter writers declared that “‘Israel’ is not a country,” but a colonial and genocidal state. They characterized the events of Oct. 7 as a war crime, but also expressed support for “all forms of Palestinian resistance.” They argued that the Hamas attack was a direct result of “Israel’s 75-year-long systemic campaign to eradicate Palestinians.”
Altogether, 73 students and one alum signed – a sixth of the law school. More than half had used an anonymous moniker such as “Student in Solidarity,” but 36 signed with their full names.
By Sunday – 48 hours after its creation – screenshots of the petition had gone viral on social media, inciting waves of vitriol against Lincoln Alexander and its students. Signatories were doxxed and told they would never get jobs.
“I certainly wouldn’t hire any of these students and the fact some choose to ‘show’ their solidarity by keeping their name hidden means I’d have to write off hiring anyone from years 1-3 from the current crop at @LincAlexLawTMU,” Toronto lawyer Jeff Hershberg tweeted that night.
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At the law school, housed on the fourth floor of TMU’s Podium building, the petition’s aftermath has affected all students in some way, whether they signed or not.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
In the days that followed, the story made national headlines. Donors dropped funding. Law firms that offered student placements withdrew from the program. And the school’s dean and TMU’s president were inundated with irate messages accusing TMU of enabling antisemitism.
Among the students, those who weren’t involved were furious that their degree and job prospects might be tainted. Some Jewish students felt ostracized. The signatories believed their administration had abandoned them to online harassment.
Over the last two months, The Globe and Mail has interviewed dozens of people connected to the controversy – faculty and staff, prominent lawyers and law firm leaders, spurned donors and students on all sides of the issue. Hundreds of documents have been reviewed, including internal TMU e-mails, donor complaint letters and Bay Street memos, collected from the people involved as well as through multiple freedom-of-information requests.
This investigation’s discoveries raise some of the most pressing questions of the moment: where is the line between hate speech and free speech – and who gets to decide? What capacity do organizations and institutions have to tolerate different political perspectives? And how do we make room for growth and mistakes in a world where anything can end up on the unforgiving internet?
For Lincoln Alexander, the petition has forced the question of whether it’s possible for an institution such as a law school to be truly different. Student-led Palestinian solidarity protests have spread across campuses in the United States and Canada, challenging university leadership. But activism in a law school presents a unique challenge for both students and administrators, who inhabit two worlds: the academic one, where free speech and academic inquiry are paramount, and the legal one, where there are professional consequences for speech that could tarnish a firm’s reputation with clients.
This is the story of how a three-page letter written by a group of twentysomething students led to a crisis not only at one law school, but in the Canadian legal world at large.
Months after the controversy, tensions over the Gaza war have persisted at TMU. In late April, the school closed off areas of campus to pre-empt protest encampments. Students gathered to write pro-Palestinian messages and faculty gathered to speak.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
R is a student who signed her name and she would do it again today. (The Globe interviewed about a dozen signatories; some will be identified with an initial and others have been kept confidential, as many have received death threats.)
She found activism in high school, volunteering in the areas of harm reduction and gender-based violence. She decided to become a lawyer to fix the justice system’s problems from the inside. Only one law school interested her: Lincoln Alexander, named for the history-making lawyer who, in 1968, became the first Black person elected to the House of Commons and later Canada’s first Black cabinet minister. “I’ve done work with people who are unhoused, incarcerated, on bail – people who are the most disenfranchised by the justice system,” R said. “TMU marketed themselves as a place to do that work.”
But just weeks into law school, R says she felt duped. In one of her classes, she was asked to write a sentencing brief for someone charged with a drug-related offence. R wrote an analysis about why the accused should serve no jail time and instead receive care. She says the professor nearly failed her.
After Oct. 7, R and many of her classmates felt that their law school should publicly support Palestinians. The students were told the university doesn’t make political statements, but they pushed back: If Lincoln Alexander meant all the things it had said in its marketing, it had a duty to speak up.
Meanwhile, Jewish students and faculty were also pressuring the administration to release a statement condemning Hamas and expressing solidarity with the Jewish people. They relied on the same argument – that Lincoln Alexander’s commitment to equity meant it had to be vocal. The school stayed firm. On Oct. 11, it released an internal e-mail to the school community that acknowledged a loss of life in both “Israel and Palestine.” It called for “peace and justice” and advised students to engage in discourse with “humility, empathy, respect, and professionalism.”
The statement left many unhappy.
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Images of injured Palestinians and abducted Israelis flooded social media in the war's initial weeks as all sides demanded action.MOHAMMED ABED/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; HANNAH MCKAY/REUTERS
On campus, the conflict was coming up in some classrooms. Jewish students reported that the conversation could be one-sided and made them uncomfortable. Complaints were also filed about Jewish professors for a variety of reasons. With each passing day, horrifying images of dead children – killed in Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza – were being posted to Instagram and TikTok. As were the faces of the 250 hostages, who included a baby and preschoolers.
Throughout this fraught period, students were glued to social media, taking note – and often screenshots – of what their classmates and professors were liking, posting and resharing.
Then one of the school’s senior administrators, associate dean Sari Graben, retweeted messages from the Israel Defence Forces. She also reposted a comment that remarked how quickly the world was to doubt Jewish claims of terrorism, while accepting Hamas’s word at face value.
Some students were enraged.
To them, an associate dean promoting these messages was tantamount to the administration taking a side. But from the law school’s perspective, Ms. Graben was posting from her personal account and the comments were protected speech.
A meeting was scheduled between the deans and some students. Ms. Graben did not apologize for the posts, but agreed to take them down, because – she explained later to The Globe in an e-mail – she felt it was her job as an academic leader to be responsive to student concerns and to “bring a sense of calm dialogue to very complex geopolitical issues” that impact everyone. Students left the meeting feeling their concerns weren’t being taken seriously.
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Dean Donna Young heard from students directly as they grew frustrated about the response from other administrators.KATE DOCKERAY
This seems to have been the tipping point.
A group of like-minded students launched a letter-writing campaign to Ms. Young. Next, a small student club called the Abolitionist Organizing Collective decided to put the concerns in a petition.
On Oct. 20, the student club posted the draft in a Google document and sent the link to classmates through group chats, text messages and social media direct messages: “SIGN THIS LETTER if you wish to demand that the LASL administration unequivocally stand in solidarity with Palestine!”
That same day, the club sent the petition to Ms. Young. Unbeknownst to most of the signatories, the club characterized the document as an “open letter.”
M, a signee and a member of the Abolitionist Organizing Collective, said the language in the petition is drawn from sources such as Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. The document does cite various UN reports, but in a sign of the times, it also footnotes a social media reel from a popular pro-Palestinian commentator.
For her, the response to the petition’s wording has been infuriating. She believes people are purposely misreading the line about “all forms” of resistance in order to distract from the core message: while grieving for Israel, do not ignore the long-standing pain of Palestinians.
“The letter leaves no room for misinterpreting the Oct. 7 attacks, which we call a war crime, with the Palestinian right to resist,” said M, who dreams of a career in international human rights law.
R has a similar view on the response to the “all forms” line: “I read that as folks who are colonized don’t owe us an explanation for their resistance.”
As for the controversial “‘Israel’ is not a country” line – it’s not, said several signatories. And neither is Canada.
“We are all people who critique Canada for violent settler colonialism,” said C, who signed anonymously. She, like others, regularly participates in Indigenous-led blockades. “I am not picking on Israel for being a colonial state. I am a settler living in a colonial state. To treat Israel differently just because they’re Jewish is the definition of discrimination.”
The petition is directed at the Israeli state, not Jews, say these students, who categorically deny being antisemitic.
One of the signatories is a Palestinian with family living in the West Bank: “I was very proud of the letter when I saw it.”
This group of signatories doesn’t regret signing, even though the blowback was painful. As for any negative repercussions for their careers, students such as R, M and C say they don’t want to work on Bay Street anyways.
On Oct. 20 – the day the TMU petition came out – a protester hurls a rock at Israeli forces in Ramallah and volunteers inspect the damage Hamas inflicted on Kibbutz Be’eri two weeks earlier. At that time, Israel’s ground troops had not yet entered Gaza, but its air strikes had killed thousands of Palestinians.NASSER NASSER/AP; RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Despite all signing on to the same letter, the petition signatories are not a monolith.
Many said they disagreed with the extreme language, but wanted to do something to support Palestinians.
At that moment in time – the third week of October – Israel had not launched its ground invasion, but more than 3,700 Palestinians had been killed, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry. (That number is now estimated by Palestinian health authorities to be about 37,000). The humanitarian crisis was also under way. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned of “a dangerous new low,” with water, food, fuel and medical supplies running out in Gaza.
This group of signatories said they worried what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of “mighty vengeance” would mean for civilians. They supported a ceasefire and efforts to open humanitarian corridors. And even though they had issues with some of the petition’s points – including wording that questioned Israel’s legitimacy – most students believed the petition would never be made public, so they weren’t concerned about agreeing with every word. (After the leak, the Abolitionist Organizing Collective apologized to signees for not clarifying that the petition would be an open letter.)
“I saw it as a way to start a conversation with the dean,” said one signee. This student – like several – didn’t read the document closely before adding their name, because they thought it wasn’t supposed to be some “big, official thing.”
For this group, the fallout has been especially devastating.
One signatory, who read the document in full for the first time on social media, recalls feeling nauseous. A friend had texted to say it was online. By the time the signee logged on, people were posting screenshots of their personal social accounts and labelling them a terrorist sympathizer.
A first-year signee said they read the petition and knew it was inflammatory, but they wanted to show support for Palestinians. Classmates were urging each other to show their solidarity. They didn’t think about how it might impact the school or their Jewish peers.
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Once the petition was released, students who had applied for jobs began to field questions about it from law firms and Queen's Park.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The petition landed in the middle of the summer-position hiring process. Copies of e-mails viewed by The Globe show that, beginning on Oct. 25, employers – firms such as Miller Thomson, Aird & Berlis and Cassels Brock & Blackwell, as well as the Ministry of the Attorney General – began reaching out to TMU applicants with concerns about the petition and asked students to disclose whether they had signed.
“While we by no means demand that people outside our Firm agree with our own values, when recruiting law students who we hope will develop their careers with us and some of whom will grow to be our senior leaders, we do seek out people who share our fundamental values,” read an e-mail from Miller Thomson. “Accordingly, if you have signed this letter or intend to do so, we would ask that you withdraw your candidacy with us.”
Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General said that, given the uncertainty around who had endorsed the petition, all TMU law students seeking employment with the ministry would have to sign an attestation “that they did not sign the letter, either openly or anonymously.”
The Globe reached out to the ministry as well as each of the law firms for comment. Aird & Berlis noted that in the most recent summer student recruitment round, they hired students from several law schools – including Lincoln Alexander. Cassels declined to comment and Miller Thomson said it was committed to fostering a safe and respectful work environment. The Ministry of the Attorney General said it followed a procedure that was fair and transparent.
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Across Toronto's financial district, TMU students who signed the petition began to face pushback as the controversy grew.FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
On Bay Street, firm leaders say there was internal pressure from some partners not to take on any TMU students, because there was no way to know who had signed anonymously. Some firms were able to avoid the issue because they hadn’t tapped Lincoln Alexander students for summer interviews, but those that had were left navigating a minefield.
One senior partner in a management role, who is not being named because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said the feeling was that hiring Lincoln Alexander students would invite unnecessary risk, both in terms of upsetting current partners and potentially creating tension with clients: “No one is going to say this on the record, but of course every name on that letter is on a list now.”
For the students, the ramifications weren’t just jobs.
A signatory in her first year had signed up for a mentorship program with the Crown attorney’s office, but after the petition became public, the lawyer she had been paired with never wrote back. The program was later “paused.”
She received messages calling her a terrorist supporter. “I have seen the letter you signed and as a result, I have written to every law firm and provided them your name and that you support the terrorist group Hamas,” read one e-mail.
Another signatory says she fell into a depression. She was in her early twenties and less than two months into law school when the saga erupted: “To feel like everything was over before it even started was really scary.”
At Lincoln Alexander, after the petition had been sent to Ms. Young, the administration went into crisis mode. Senior leaders held an emergency meeting on Saturday, Oct. 21. On the Monday, the day after the petition went viral, the law school issued a statement: “We unequivocally condemn the sentiments of Antisemitism and intolerance expressed in this message.”
Signees told The Globe they felt betrayed. As they dealt with being doxxed, their own school had labelled them as antisemitic, emboldening the people who were sending them threats.
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TMU president Mohamed Lachemi's inbox was flooded with messages demanding that petition signatories be expelled or penalized.CHRISTOPHER KATSAROV/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Others felt the administration’s response was grossly inadequate.
Jonathan Rosenthal, a criminal defence lawyer, an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and bencher with the law society, co-wrote an open letter that was signed by about 20 prominent Toronto lawyers, including Brian Greenspan, Will McDowell and Tom Curry, which expressed “grave concern” with the response. They were especially struck that the school’s statement had not discussed consequences. The inboxes of Ms. Young and TMU president Mohamed Lachemi were inundated with dozens of messages, some of which demanded the students be immediately expelled.
(In November, TMU announced it was bringing in former chief justice of Nova Scotia, Michael MacDonald – who most recently co-led the Mass Casualty Commission – to investigate whether the signatories had violated the code of non-academic conduct. The law school itself did not initiate the investigation.)
But this backlash had its own backlash. More than 700 members of the legal community published an open letter chastising the “lawyers, law firms and law schools” who were conflating criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism. “This chilling effect on freedom of expression and academic freedom has the hallmarks of a new McCarthyism.”
Meanwhile, in the weeks after the petition, Ms. Young and other school leaders met with prominent players in the legal community, according to both interviews with lawyers involved and records obtained through access requests. The administrators apologized and tried to reassure them that Lincoln Alexander had a plan to move forward. They also advocated on behalf of those signatories who had expressed deep regret.
About 10 of the regretful signatories had tried to write a letter explaining themselves and apologizing. In the end, they decided it would only make things worse.
“It felt like it didn’t matter,” said one of them. “No one was listening.”
Hours after the Abolitionist Organizing Collective originally shared the petition with students, a member of the Jewish Law Students’ Association reposted the link in the club’s group chat. One member of the group recalls a sinking feeling as she watched more and more of her classmates’ names appear.
“The fact that they started off with Israel is not a real country – they’re totally invalidating the Jewish experience. And the fact that they were saying ‘all’ resistance is justified in the context of Oct. 7 – you’re saying it’s okay to murder innocent Israelis for their cause,” she said. “I know there are two sides to this and people are getting hurt on both sides. And I know not everyone is going to have the same views, but Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
This student, like other Jewish students who spoke to The Globe, would only do so on condition of anonymity. They said they have felt shunned in the hallways. The rhetoric on campus, they say, is anti-Israeli, and by extension antisemitic.
Joshua Sealy-Harrington, an assistant professor at Lincoln Alexander, disagrees with that conclusion, and said that a “feeling” that something is antisemitic is not enough to make it so.
“There are plenty of men who are upset by ideas in feminism. They can be bothered by it. They can say it’s anti-man. No one credibly says that if some men are upset by feminism that feminism is therefore sexist,” he said.
Within TMU, Prof. Sealy-Harrington is a polarizing figure. He is a fierce anti-Zionist and has been the only faculty member in the law school to forcefully defend the signatories on social media and in news reports. Some of his colleagues say the professor inflamed the situation at a time when a sizable group of signees were trying to move on. Prof. Sealy-Harrington told The Globe it was “ridiculous” to suggest he was making things worse by defending “vulnerable students from defamation by their own administration.”
In April, he was voted “professor of the year,” although he is leaving the school. In September, he will be teaching at the University of Windsor’s faculty of law.
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Joshua Sealy-Harrington's efforts to defend the signatories drew criticism from some colleagues who said it made matters worse.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
For people such as lawyer Adam Wagman, whose firm Howie, Sacks & Henry cancelled a $75,000 donation to TMU because of the petition, Prof. Sealy-Harrington’s views on antisemitism are frustrating.
He said that in the past several years, the wider culture has gained a better grasp of concepts such as anti-racism and micro-aggressions, and the idea that the impact of an action on a marginalized group – not the offender’s intentions – is the most important. So why do non-Jews get to tell him, a Jewish man, what constitutes antisemitism?
“Israel is existential for Jews – period. When there was no Israel, there was nowhere for Jews to go. And as a result, almost 40 per cent of Jews on the face of the Earth were killed,” Mr. Wagman said. “This happened during my parents’ lifetime … When you question the right of Israel to exist, you question my right to be safe.”
Jillian Rogin, an associate professor at the University of Windsor’s law school and member of the Jewish Faculty Network, rejected the idea that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
“In my view, criticism of Israel, even if it hurts many Jewish people who identify with Israel, is a difference of political opinion,” she said. “The idea that Israel, as a national state, is acting in the interests of Jews everywhere is very flawed … It’s acting in its own interests.”
Prof. Rogin, who is currently working on a PhD about Jewish advocacy and hate-speech legislation in Canada, said that after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli State and its supporters actively worked to frame anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism in order to shield themselves from scrutiny. People should not collapse the two, she said.
But Osgoode Hall Law School’s Prof. Rosenthal said that even questioning whether the petition is antisemitic is in and of itself offensive.
“Any student who signed that letter committed professional suicide,” he said. “They will never be hired by the government. They will never be a judge or gain any prominence in law.”
As to whether there is a path forward for those who want to make amends, Prof. Rosenthal says it’s important to remember that the signees are not teenagers. They are training to be lawyers, a profession where judgment is crucial. However, Prof. Rosenthal says he approached Lincoln Alexander and offered to help any student who wanted to publicly retract their support for the petition: “No one took me up on that.”
(Of the students who spoke to The Globe, none were aware of this offer, although several said they would not have considered it because Prof. Rosenthal was leading the public campaign against them.)
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Jonathan Rosenthal says signatories of the petition at TMU 'will never be a judge or gain any prominence in law.'SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Lincoln Alexander tried to host its own sessions in an effort to start rebuilding the community. The school launched a series of “listening circles” facilitated by Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, the authors of The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. None of the signatories who spoke to The Globe attended.
“Unfortunately, these were happening during the external investigation,” said a first-year signee. “I think a lot of us wanted to go, but we were worried that what we may say could be used against us. The school had come out and said we were antisemitic. So there was a lack of trust.”
The Globe sent questions to the administrators at Lincoln Alexander about the crisis and how it plans to move forward. In an e-mail, Ms. Young – who is currently on a sabbatical that was previously planned – and interim dean Graham Hudson wrote that they acknowledge much work needs to be done.
“We’re still a young law school but we know there’s tremendous resilience here that will enable us to continue thriving,” they wrote. “We remain deeply committed to ensuring that all students, faculty, and staff at the law school feel supported and experience a sense of belonging and wellbeing.”
With respect to applications, it will likely take another year to assess the impact. Applicants were up 11.4 per cent for the 2024/25 academic year, however the deadline was Nov. 1 last year, just as the scandal was unfolding.
TMU would not provide stats on the number of students who secured summer jobs, but anecdotally, it appears that the majority were able to find one. Few secured positions on Bay Street, although TMU students are not necessarily focused on that career track. Some Jewish students who spoke to The Globe said networks within the legal community have supported them.
Demonstrators put pro-Palestinian messages on the TMU sidewalk in late April as the school fenced off the nearby Kerr Quad for ‘spring maintenance’ and ‘concerns about unauthorized activity.’ Encampments had been rapidly spreading at other universities in the preceding weeks.SAMMY KOGAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
On May 31, 2024, more than six months after launching his investigation into whether those who had signed the petition had violated the code of conduct, Justice MacDonald released his findings: The letter may be troubling and offensive to many, but it was not antisemitic. He noted that students had intended to criticize Israel, not Jewish people. He concluded the comments were protected under the university’s Statement on Freedom of Speech, which provides students with wide latitude to explore ideas.
“The standard is not perfection. Students are entitled to make mistakes, and even cause harm, without necessarily facing sanctions,” he wrote.
As for the administration, Justice MacDonald sharply criticized the school for publicly labelling the petition as antisemitic – an act he says contributed to the backlash. (The Globe asked Ms. Young about this and she indicated that she accepted the findings of the report.) The report did acknowledge that given the public outcry, administrators felt they needed to act quickly: “With hindsight, the reaction was understandable, albeit regrettable.”
Prof. Sealy-Harrington said the report “unambiguously vindicates” the students and those who defended them.
For Prof. Rosenthal, the MacDonald report and analysis was deeply flawed and will not change anyone’s mind. “I think it’s horribly antisemitic. I stand by what I said … Substitute any minority other than Jews, and none of this would even be a discussion.”
The professional world has also not been satisfied.
One prominent leader at a Bay Street firm said the fact that the MacDonald report found no wrongdoing and didn’t propose even a symbolic punishment – such as a one-day suspension – has made moving forward difficult.
James Noronha, who was the president of the law school’s student society this past year, said it’s important to remember that the MacDonald report didn’t give the signatories a free pass.
“He said it didn’t meet the definition of breaching the code of conduct, but it also says there were deep flaws in the advocacy that was put forward and we need to learn from it,” Mr. Noronha said. “I think the report reflects that two things can be true at once: You can be within the code of conduct, and actions can be well intentioned, but it can still cause harm.”
Mr. Noronha, who just graduated from Lincoln Alexander, came to TMU as a mature student. He had spent 17 years working with the Special Olympics and has pursued a career in disability law. During the crisis, he served as a sounding board for students on all sides.
“People want a say, they want to speak, but the listening part is really hard. At the same time everyone has been speaking in these absolutes,” he said. “They’d like to see action from the school, from the students, from the legal community, professors, and I get that. But over the course of the year, the thing you realize is there are not perfect actions or perfect words for every moment.”
Say a lot that you idolize oppressive religious extremist terrorists simply because they share your contempt for Jews.
p.s. Your Houthis may call themselves Yemen but they aren't.
I don't idolize any of them, basketcase.
That's the point, Israel is on the list with the taliban and ISIS as child killers.
They are talking about leaving the UN, even after the US gave them everything they wanted they still wouldn't agree to a ceasefire.
So now Israel is ignoring 2 UNSC ceasefire resolutions, 2 ICJ sets of provisional measures and upcoming ICC charges.
Israel owns so many really fucking evil records.
Most UN workers killed.
Most journalists killed.
Most women killed.
Most children killed.
Most children crippled.
Biggest famine in the world.
And here you are whining that someone dare talk about Yemen in the same sentence.
Yemeni come across as angels in comparison.
Zionists are on the same level as ISIS, taliban and frigging nazis.
NEERO'S GUESTS
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.
Nero's Guests
I gave this talk in Blackburn, England during a campaign event for my friend Craig Murray who is running for parliament.
chrishedges.substack.com
It’s appalling what bottom feeder’s supporters of POS Nation are. The hate they were indoctrinated with is repugnant.
How long did you think you would get away with this Tapper? You are becoming bad for the brand.
Wow, so horrible.
I guess that justifies killing 15,000 children.
No wonder zionists need to use human shields to protect themselves.
Israeli forces strap injured Palestinian to vehicle to use as human shield
In Jenin, videos have shown an Israeli armoured vehicle driving past ambulances with an injured Palestinian man strapped to the hood, in what appears to be a case of using him as a human shield.
“It does seem there’s no other logical explanation to tie up a man who’s visibly injured and in pain to the hood of an armoured vehicle as it moves through Jenin after laying siege to at least two homes, searching them and detaining a number of people,” Nour Odeh said, reporting from Ramallah.
“That shocking image of the Jeep … is something that is repeated in several ways in the West Bank and it is what human rights organisations call the use of human shields. It’s been done on several occasions.”
Medical sources said they are treating two injuries in hospitals in Jenin, she added.
Wow, so horrible.
I guess that justifies killing 15,000 children.
No wonder zionists need to use human shields to protect themselves.
Israeli forces strap injured Palestinian to vehicle to use as human shield
In Jenin, videos have shown an Israeli armoured vehicle driving past ambulances with an injured Palestinian man strapped to the hood, in what appears to be a case of using him as a human shield.
“It does seem there’s no other logical explanation to tie up a man who’s visibly injured and in pain to the hood of an armoured vehicle as it moves through Jenin after laying siege to at least two homes, searching them and detaining a number of people,” Nour Odeh said, reporting from Ramallah.
“That shocking image of the Jeep … is something that is repeated in several ways in the West Bank and it is what human rights organisations call the use of human shields. It’s been done on several occasions.”
Medical sources said they are treating two injuries in hospitals in Jenin, she added.
SOME INSIDE DOPE ON THE HASBARA
JUNE 21, 2024How a Hedge Fund Manager and Right-Wing Donor is Financing an Israeli Influence Op Masquerading as a Journalism Project
BY KEN SILVERSTEIN
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Vulture capitalist, right-wing financier and all-around shithead Paul Singer. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Paul Singer is a rapacious hedge fund manager and leading donor to the GOP and pro-Israel groups who retains a raft of corporate intelligence firms to slant the news in ways that favor his personal and political interests. In his spare time, he plots to topple governments and beggar citizens in the Third World to increase profit margins at Elliott Investment Management, the investment firm he founded and controls.
Charles Krauthammer, who’s dead, worked for the Carter administration writing bland, dreary speeches for bland, dreary Vice President Walter Mondale before morphing into a right-wing pundit whose columns were as lifeless and dull as the tripe he penned for his former boss in the White House West Wing. A rabid Zionist like Singer, Krauthammer never met an Israeli war crime he couldn’t turn into an op-ed that claimed it never happened, but if it had Palestinians were to blame.
What do you get when you combine Singer and Krauthammer? Voilà! The Krauthammer Fellowship, which awards 15 positions annually to “aspiring writers, journalists, scholars, and policy analysts” under the age of 35 and provides them with “editorial mentorship” and help placing their work. The fellowship is run by the New York-based Tikvah Fund, which runs media, educational, and policy programs in the US, Israel, and other countries as part of its broad goal of building “a new generation” of committed Zionists.
This year’s coterie includes Kassy Dillon, “an opinion journalist and political commentator for the Daily Wire” who previously was the US editor for Jewish News Syndicate and a video journalist for Fox News Digital; Adam Hoffman, a policy advisor on the DeSantis for President campaign who’s written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Review; and Zineb Riboua, a research associate and program manager of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, whose work has appeared Foreign Policy and Tablet. If the Israeli government directly handpicked the Krauthammer fellows, it couldn’t have found a more reliable, devoted group of media cheerleaders – which, of course, is the program’s fundamental purpose.
The Krauthammer Fellowship was launched in 2019, a year after his death, and was established to honor his dedication to “pursuing truth through honest, rigorous argument,” in the words of the Tikvah Fund’s website, though that description bears absolutely no resemblance to its namesake’s oeuvre. An egregious hack and one-man state-controlled news outlet, Krauthammer ceaselessly churned out bilge throughout his career, with a heavy focus on “America’s special role” in the world, its superficially similar but somehow entirely distinctive “special place” in the world, and the “special responsibility” the United States must carry on its shoulders as a result, all which he noted in a single sentence of a particularly turgid 2003 Washington Post op-ed.
Independent journalist Charles Krauthammer with his good friend President Ronald Reagan in a 1986 photo taken at the White House. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Krauthammer was lauded by his peers as an expert on the Middle East, which he demonstrated in an article published shortly before the US invasion of Iraq the same year. The US had no choice but to take out Saddam Hussein, he argued, because with the nuclear weapons he was likely to have in his arsenal soon (though it turned out he never came close and wasn’t even trying) along with the weapons of mass destruction he already has (which he didn’t), the Iraqi leader posed a “threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman,” which was “intolerable…and must be preempted.”
A close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, who described their relationship as “like brothers,” Krauthammer wrote an essay in 2006 that summarized the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute that began six decades earlier “when the UN voted to create a Jewish state and a Palestinian state side by side,” and while “the Jews accepted the compromise, the Palestinians rejected it.” Israel survived, which was its “original sin” and the reason why Palestinians had hated their good-hearted neighbors ever since.
All this makes the Tikvah Fund, which is staffed from top to bottom with Israeli diehards, a logical sponsor of the Krauthammer Fellowship. The organization’s current board includes Elliott Abrams, who ranks near the top of any credible list of most nauseating US government officials of modern times along with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Samantha Power; and Terry Kassel, a major fundraiser for pro-Israel groups who the Jerusalem Post put on its list of “Top 50 Most Influential Jews of 2022,” and who holds a number of positions with Elliott Investment Management and is a director of the Singer Foundation as well.
Elliott Abrams when he worked for President Donald Trump as the US Special Representative for Venezuela. Image enlarged to enhance Abrams’ appropriately ghoul-like appearance. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The Tikvah Fund isn’t shy about promoting its role managing the Krauthammer Fellowship, which is extensively discussed on the organization’s website. The financing provided by Singer, on the other hand, is only obliquely noted on the Fund’s site, which says it runs the project “in partnership” with his foundation.
For its part, the Singer Foundation makes no mention at all of the Krauthammer Fellowship or the Tikvah Fund on its own website, which is incredibly stingy about providing details about any of its operations and activities. Not a single current or past grant recipient is identified, there’s no information about how to apply, and indeed there’s nothing on the website at all beyond a concise bio of Singer, which says the New York Times has called him “one of the most revered” hedge fund managers on Wall Street, and an equally sparse description of the Foundation that says its priorities include “supporting free-market and pro-growth economic policies, the rule of law, intellectual diversity on campuses, US national security, individual freedom, the future of Israel and the Jewish people.”
The discretion is probably due to Singer’s prominent, and not generally flattering, role in the public spotlight. A textbook vulture capitalist, he’s perhaps best known for buying up the sovereign debt of countries teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar and using his political influence, money and army of lawyers to coerce their governments to pay it back for multiple times more. His most spectacular success came in Argentina, where his hedge fund’s activities over many years ultimately led to the collapse of the government and pushed vast numbers of people into poverty.
Between 2021 and 2022, Singer was the seventeenth largest political contributor in the US and the tenth biggest to the Republican Party, whose political committees and candidates received the entirety of the $22 million he shelled out during that period, according to OpenSecrets.com. He’s also a major donor and past or current board member at many right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Claremont Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, which published a vicious anti-Muslim article the day after the Christchurch mass murderer killed more than 50 people at two mosques in 2019, saying he was expressing a “legitimate concern,” as reported here by the Public Accountability Initiative, better known as LittleSis.
Singer has also spent heavily to support conservative publications and reporters, with Commentary and the Washington Free Beacon being two of the outlets he’s financed. Another of Singer’s pet causes is getting information into the press that makes him and his hedge fund look good, and to advance his political and financial interests. One of the ways he’s accomplished the latter is by retaining the services of a variety of Washington private intelligence firms, including Fusion GPS – I’ll be writing more about some of the other companies who’ve worked for Singer a little bit down the road – which he hired during the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign to compile dirt on Donald Trump in order to help Marco Rubio, his No. 1 choice,.
Singer has supplemented the cash he dispenses to conservative causes out of his own deep pockets with money from his foundation, which has assets just north of $1 billion, according to its latest nonprofit tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service. Neither the foundation nor the Tikvah Fund disclose how much Singer has dispensed to underwrite the Krauthammer Fellowship, which initially provided fellows with a “full-time salary” for two years but subsequently reduced the term to nine months and the compensation to a paltry $5,000.
It’s still a pretty sweet gig that pays for fellows to attend retreats and conferences, among a range of sweeteners. The lucky few selected to be Krauthammer Fellows are hard to distinguish based on their bios at the Tikvah Fund’s website. Tuvia Gerin is an Israeli Army Reserve Captain and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Andrew Gabel is a past special advisor to Senator Tom Cotton and research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Daniel Samet is another ex-staffer for Cotton and Graduate Fellow at the Rumsfeld Foundation, which I could add a lot more about, but the name is really all you need to know.
“Student radicals and outside agitators who had watched university administrators capitulate to mob tactics at Columbia, Yale, and other universities thought they could get away with the same antics in Texas,” Samet, a past awardee, wrote in a story published in National Review two months ago that’s listed on the Tikvah Fund’s website as an example of Krauthammer Fellows’ prime work. “Boy were they wrong.” It praised the University of Texas at Austin for approving cracking heads of “pro-Hamas” students protesting Israel’s military assault on Gaza, unlike the namby-pamby liberal administrators at Columbia, Yale, and other universities who chose to “capitulate to mob tactics.”
“What pure evil looks like,” the headline above another story featured by the Tikvah Fund that was co-authored by current fellow Kassy Dillon for Fox News quoted LeElle Slifer, a US citizen who had family members taken hostage by Hamas last October 7. “Israel cares for innocent people, no matter whether they are Palestinian or Jewish,” Slifer told Dillon. “They don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Other articles written by past and present Krauthammer Fellows that the Tikvah Fund promotes include “Harvard Shrugs at Jew Hatred” by J.J. Kimche in the Wall Street Journal; “Why and How to Revive American Anti-Communism” by Gary Dreyer in Commentary; and “In the City of Slaughter” by Daniel Kane in Public Discourse, which needless to say wasn’t a reference to any of the towns in Gaza the Israeli military has turned into graveyards of rubble, but to the collective plight of Israelis and Jews, like the author, who prior to last October 7 had been “cocooned in the security blanket provided by the IDF and the Iron Dome” and falsely imagined “the Jewish people had entered a new chapter of their history…safely divorced from the agony and fear that dominated Jewish life for more than 2,000 years.”
While these stories may not be remembered as historic works of journalism generations from now, that’s not what Singer’s paying for. His goal is to gin up pro-Israel propaganda and apologias for war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Force, and in that regard he’s probably getting a better return on investment than is indicated by the abysmal work product of Charles Krauthammer’s worthy successors.
This story first appeared on Ken Silverstein’s Washington Babylon substack page.
Ken Silverstein is a politically eclectic DC-based investigative journalist and creator of Washington Babylon.
