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Hamas taunted Israeli hostages with images of antisemitic Columbia University protests: ‘We have our own people everywhere'

Hamas taunted Israeli hostages with images of antisemitic Columbia University protests: ‘We have our own people everywhere'

New York Post30-05-2025
Hamas captors cruelly taunted Israeli hostages with news stories and photos of antisemitic protests at Columbia University — and bragged about having an 'army' of propagandists to spread their hate, according to new court papers.
Freed hostage Shlomi Ziv claimed he was shown disturbing images and stories of the protests that engulfed the Upper Manhattan campus last year while he was in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
5 A new filing in a federal lawsuit claims anti-Israeli Columbia University protesters are 'foot soldiers' for Hamas.
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5 Columbia University's Upper Manhattan campus has been a hotbed of anti-Israeli sentiment since the Oct. 7 attack.
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'With the news report on, his captors told him, 'You see, we have our own people everywhere,' a court filing from Thursday said. 'They then told him that Hamas has an 'army' operating out of Gaza that focuses specifically on media and sending Hamas propaganda and messaging throughout America.'
The shocking allegation was revealed in an amended lawsuit filed against a slew of anti-Israel groups in Manhattan federal court for 'aiding and abetting Hamas' continuing acts of international terrorism and violations of the law of nations' following the terror groups Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead and hundreds kidnapped.
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Ziv, who is a plaintiff in the suit, was held in captivity for 246 days before he and four others were rescued in an Israel raid in June 2024. He claimed he was shown Al-Jazeera stories and pictures of the Columbia protests and that his captors 'bragged about having Hamas operatives on American university campuses.'
Filed on behalf of former hostages, the families of slain hostages, and former Israeli military personnel drawn into the Jewish State's counter-offensive against Hamas in Gaza, the suit claims the Ivy League school's protest organizers are essentially an arm of the terror group that impacted their lives.
5 Shlomi Ziv was taken hostage by Hamas and held for over 240 days in the Gaza Strip before being freed.
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5 Anti-Israeli organizers at Columbia University are essentially part of the Hamas terror network, a new lawsuit claims.
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'The associated defendants acted as Hamas' foot soldiers in New York City and on Columbia's campus and enacted [protest organizer's] plan to disrupt Columbia's operations to assist Hamas,' the suit said.
The lawsuit, originally filed March 24, names several campus groups, including Within Our Lives, United for Palestine, Columbia Students for Justice In Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice For Peace, and individual group founders or leaders.
Ziv, an Israeli citizen, was working security at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7 when he was kidnapped. He and other hostages were starved and beaten 'almost every day,' their doctor said.
The Manhattan campus has been a hotbed for anti-Israeli demonstrations that have terrorized Jewish students — including some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit who were enrolled at the school.
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The school is among dozens of colleges and universities in the US that have seen pro-Palestinian protests, and anti-Israeli encampments following the Oct. 7 attack.
5 Shlomi Zi after his rescue by Israeli military forces in Gaza, where he was held for more than 240 days.
AFP via Getty Images
Last week, students burned their diplomas in protest on the Columbia campus, two weeks after masked student protesters stormed into the Butler Library at the school.
Last year, a mob of students took over Hamilton Hall on the campus and had to be forced out in a wild NYPD raid, leading to several arrests.
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Safe Spaces Are Coming Back to Brown University—All Thanks to Trump
Safe Spaces Are Coming Back to Brown University—All Thanks to Trump

Yahoo

time16 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Safe Spaces Are Coming Back to Brown University—All Thanks to Trump

Brown University has settled with the Trump administration, which is currently waging war on elite institutions of higher education. Under the guise of combating antisemitism on campuses—an important problem, though not one the federal government is well-suited to address—President Donald Trump's Education Department has gone after Columbia University, Harvard University, and also Brown. Brown's deal with the federal government has been described as more favorable to the university than Columbia's; Harvard has yet to reach an agreement at all, but is reportedly willing to spend up to $500 million to settle the matter. Large sums of money are at stake for all three universities, as the federal government is responsible for doling out billions of dollars in research grants. Brown is the recipient of $510 million in public funding. So it's not surprising that Brown wanted to make a deal. It's unfortunate, of course, that the Trump administration is using the threat of a funding reduction to dictate terms to what is ultimately a private institution. This is obviously a version of jawboning, in which political figures use non-legislative means to achieve some sort of policy end. When the Biden administration threatened social media companies and browbeat them into making different moderation decisions, it was swiftly recognized as a free speech issue by many conservatives, libertarians, and even some on the left. It's similarly vexing when the Trump administration—which has pledged to restore free speech and end federally driven censorship—does this. It's true that institutions of higher education are not entitled to federal funding, which, after all, is paid by taxpayers. The Trump administration, or any administration, could decide, in a moment of unusual frugality, that the U.S. is too indebted to continue sending billions of dollars to wealthy private organizations that have their own massive endowments. But the government shouldn't use the threat of a funding cut as a form of coercion. That's no different from how the Obama administration handled Title IX enforcement: Obama's Education Department instructed campuses to adopt policies that were hostile to free speech and due process, and they implied that federal research dollars would evaporate in the event of noncompliance. Indeed, the extent to which the Obama higher ed coercion blueprint has been adopted by Trump is under-acknowledged. All that said, the details of the Brown settlement are disturbing in their own right. It's true that Brown avoided some of the harsher penalties that Columbia got stuck with, and it's good that the settlement recognizes that the government has no "authority to dictate Brown's curriculum or the content of academic speech." Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, complains that the settlement includes "no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring," but the only thing it really says about hiring is that it must be race neutral. The Supreme Court has already held that race-based hiring and admissions policies are almost always impermissible, so this is hardly some unreasonable, out-of-nowhere demand. But Dubal is also concerned about a provision of the settlement that permits the feds to collect and read Brown faculty course evaluations, and that's legitimately concerning. In fact, it speaks to the most troubling aspect of the settlement: It lends itself toward the creation of a campus antisemitism police that will be laser-focused on identifying, cataloguing, and eliminating uncomfortable and offensive speech that is nevertheless clearly protected by the First Amendment. In other words, the Trump administration is directly encouraging the formation of campus safe spaces. The settlement instructs Brown to survey students on their feelings of emotional safety. The survey questions are really something, and include: "whether they feel welcome at Brown; whether they feel safe reporting anti-Semitism at Brown; whether they have experienced harassment on social media." These are vague questions that will prompt subjective answers. Social media harassment is a particularly fraught topic; what constitutes harassment? If one student is being unkind to another student on Instagram or TikTok, is it really the university's job to intervene? Brown should act to counter identity-based harassment in cases where it's egregious, criminal, or abjectly violates the code of conduct. If students are drawing swastikas on Jewish people's doors, the university should certainly intervene. But the language in the settlement is too non-specific, and almost requires university administrators to overreach. No one should be naive about this, because it's obvious what's going to happen: An anti-Israel student will go after a pro-Israel student on social media, the pro-Israel student will say they are being harassed, and Brown will feel obligated to respond. No student should be made actually unsafe—i.e., be a victim of violence—because they are Jewish, or for any other reason. But it should be self-apparent to everyone who criticized the liberal safe space trend of the 2010s that re-orienting the campus speech police around the protection of Jewish students' subjective feelings of discomfort is not a positive development. 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In Canada's pledge to recognize Palestine, much depends on what comes after the words
In Canada's pledge to recognize Palestine, much depends on what comes after the words

Hamilton Spectator

time18 minutes ago

  • Hamilton Spectator

In Canada's pledge to recognize Palestine, much depends on what comes after the words

It was nearly 80 years ago that a Canadian diplomat and future prime minister first laid out the boundaries of an independent and equal Palestinian state. Lester B. Pearson was chairman of the United Nations committee that drafted the former British territory's 1947 partition plan . Had it not been hindered by a war the following year that led to the creation of the state of Israel and kicked off a decades-long cycle of violence, the plan would have carved up the land into side-by-side Arab and Jewish territories. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney took a significant step to revive the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict, one he said has been ' steadily and gravely eroded ' by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel . In announcing that he would recognize a Palestinian state before the United Nations General Assembly in September, Carney said Canada was 'standing with all people who choose peace over violence or terrorism.' It is a step that Middle East observers see as a potentially powerful signal, one that comes in concert with an identical pledge from France and a warning that Britain will follow suit if Israel does not agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and commit to a peace deal . On top of snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the recognition of Palestine risks isolating the United States, which could end up as the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council resisting the movement. This is important because a potential United Nations member state must first have the backing of the UNSC before submitting to a vote of the General Assembly, where 147 out of 193 countries already support Palestinian statehood. The move by Canada, France and the United Kingdom could also split the wealthy and influential G7 member states and push their numbers into the majority at the G20. But this political recognition is far from a magic wand that will end the war and the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Much depends on what comes after the words. If recognition is not followed by action, the declaration will remain largely symbolic, said Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow with Chatham House in London. Canada can intervene in the case against Israel in support of the principles of international law. Canada can intervene in the case against Israel in support of the principles of international law. But it could also prove to be hugely significant if it leads to a larger plan to end the war in Gaza , free the remaining Israeli hostages, deliver humanitarian aid and rebuild the devastated territory, reduce tensions in the West Bank and forge a long-term peace between Israelis and Palestinians. 'It actually should have been done long before as a way to overcome the asymmetry in negotiation between a state (Israel) and a non-state actor (the Palestinian Authority),' Mekelberg said in an interview. Carney, who spoke with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas following his declaration, said he expects the governing body, which administers the West Bank, to commit to governance reforms, to holding elections in 2026 and to demilitarizing the Palestinian state. 'It puts the onus on the Palestinians to behave as a state and not as a liberation movement,' Mekelberg said. The Israeli government has strongly objected to the move, saying that recognition is a reward for terrorism and supports a movement that wants to destroy Israel, not live beside it in peace. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on social media that Canada's decision ' will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them .' Trump posted on Truth Social the move 'will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal' with Canada. Trump's deadline for a trade deal is Friday. Trump posted on Truth Social the move 'will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal' with Canada. Trump's deadline for a trade deal is Friday. The U.S. State Department also announced Thursday that it had decided to prevent Palestinian political leaders from obtaining travel visas on grounds they had, among other things, attempted to 'internationalize' the conflict with Israel through legal proceedings at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.' But the decision by Canada, France and Britain — three countries with historically close ties to Israel — to back the Palestinian cause will also make it hard for average Israelis to ignore the existence of a shifting tide in global public opinion. This, even if a Pew Research survey published last month found that only about one in five Israelis believed it was possible for separate Israeli and Palestinian states to peacefully coexist, while half said it was not possible. The prospects for a peaceful future have little to do with the determination about whether a territory constitutes a state. The generally accepted definition was agreed to nearly a century ago at a gathering of mostly central and South American countries in Uruguay. They signed a treaty, the 1933 Montevideo Convention , resolving that a state existed as a legal entity wherever four basic criteria were met: a permanent population; a defined territory; a government; and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Canada's own difficult history with the Quebec independence movement and the geopolitical chaos prompted by the fall of communism in the 1990s is a reminder that what is written on paper rarely translates neatly into what occurs in real life. It took nearly a decade after the guns had fallen silent for Canada to recognize Kosovo as a state separate from neighbouring Serbia, although the Balkan nation still does not have a seat at the UN. In the case of Palestine and Israel, Canada and dozens of other frustrated countries have determined that recognition can serve as a potential precursor to peace, not simply as a reward for having achieved an end to the fighting. Mekelberg said that rather than viewing international recognition of Palestine as an attack on Israel, it should be seen as a 'pro-Israeli move' to end the wars, to ensure Israel's security and to fulfil the potential of both the Arab and Jewish populations. 'It's not a punishment,' he said. 'It's a step toward once and for all, finishing a conflict that is not only 77 years old, it's more than 100 years old.' Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .

Donald Trump's key sector tariffs look firm, Mark Carney says, as trade talks could go past Friday's deadline
Donald Trump's key sector tariffs look firm, Mark Carney says, as trade talks could go past Friday's deadline

Hamilton Spectator

time18 minutes ago

  • Hamilton Spectator

Donald Trump's key sector tariffs look firm, Mark Carney says, as trade talks could go past Friday's deadline

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney suggested Wednesday that U.S. tariffs on key sectors like autos, steel and aluminum will likely remain, since Donald Trump's White House views them as necessary for the national security of the United States. Two days before Trump's latest deadline to increase tariffs on Canadian goods , Carney told reporters on Parliament Hill that it is possible trade talks between his government and the U.S. administration will drag on past Friday. While Carney called the talks 'constructive' and 'complex,' he said there are certain sectors Trump views as 'strategic' for national security reasons. He named automobiles and steel — significant employers in Ontario — as well as aluminum, pharmaceuticals, lumber, and semiconductors. All those sectors in Canada are either already grappling with significant American tariffs imposed under Trump, or face the possibility of higher duties to export to the U.S. The U.S. also kept 50-per-cent tariffs on steel and aluminum in recent agreements on trade with the European Union and Japan, the same level imposed on the Canadian sectors earlier this year. Asked whether a deal is possible without tariffs on those sectors, Carney said that the United State's 'revealed approach' is to keep some level of import duties in those areas. 'In any broader deal, there are gives and takes, and there's various factors,' Carney said Wednesday. 'But I think we have to recognize that, in the strategic sectors — again, as defined by the United States: what's strategic to them — that they have tariffs.' The head of the Canadian Steel Producers Association, Catherine Cobden, told the Star this week that her sector will push for stronger Canadian counter-tariffs to match Trump's import duties on steel and aluminum if no deal is reached before Friday. Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, said he wants tariffs on his sector reduced to zero, citing how the industry is highly integrated across the Canada-U.S. border. Meanwhile, in Washington Wednesday, cabinet minister Dominic LeBlanc was among the senior government officials who travelled to the U.S. capital in search of a deal before Friday. That's when Trump has threatened to increase tariffs on Canadian goods to 35 per cent, as part of his global policy to raise import duties to increase economic activity in the U.S. and promote sectors the White House deems essential to national security. Another example came Wednesday when Trump released a proclamation that made official his previous threat to impose 50 per cent tariffs on imported copper products. The proclamation said the tariffs will kick in just after midnight Friday morning. Trump has also threatened tariffs on pharmaceutical imports that could go as high as 200 per cent. Ahead of Friday's deadline, Canadian business groups and Ontario's envoy to Washington have said Canada must preserve the exemption to Trump's tariffs for goods that comply with 2018's Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). That exemption, in place since March 7, means roughly 86 per cent of Canadian exports to the U.S. could continue to flow tariff-free, according to an estimate from RBC Economics . Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .

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