Youssef Abdelwahab, from his LinkedIn profile.
Well, now his activities have caught the attention of the Feds.
A Central Bucks teacher and student club are the subject of a federal investigation for alleged antisemitism
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating allegations of antisemitic statements by Central Bucks West teacher Youssef Abdelwahab and a Muslim student club.
by Maddie Hanna | Monday, April 29, 2024 | 12:45 PM EDT Continue reading
I have been checking the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Kentucky Kernel, the UK student newspaper for which I used to write back during the days of quill pens and inkwells, every day, and I have yet to see any reports of pro-Hamas, or pro-Israel, protests of demonstrations on campus or in the city. Yes, that shows that Kentucky students are just plain smarter than those elite and effete Ivy Leaguers, but then it occurred to me: there are very few Jewish students at UK, with Jews being a very small minority in the Bluegrass State as a whole, while the reports of demonstrations at Penn and Hahvahd and Columbia are occurring at schools with significant Jewish populations, and it leads me to think that these demonstrations really are just as much anti-Semitic as they are pro-Palestinian.
I can certainly appreciate them protesting outside of the Infernal Revenue Service building in Philadelphia. What they are protesting, however, is not something I support.
Protesters block traffic in Center City, calling for an end to war in Gaza
Organizers said the action is part of A15, a global campaign calling on U.S. officials to stop supplying arms to U.S. and end the taxpayer-funded siege in the Gaza Strip.
Drexel University is a private research university in Philadelphia, dating from 1891, and now separated by only an alleyway between 32nd and 33rd Streets in the University City section of the city. For undergraduates in general programs, total cost of three quarters per year, including housing, is $83,818 for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Police investigating vandalism at Drexel Jewish center as ‘hate crime,’ university says
Video shows masked individuals removing letters from the sign outside the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life, the university’s president said.
by Robert Moran | Tuesday, April 2, 2024 | 7:48 PM EDT
Drexel University said Tuesday that police were investigating as a hate crime the vandalism of a sign outside the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life. Continue reading
When I heard about the hunger strike by the Brown University Students for Justice in Palestine, I asked, admittedly mockingly, for them to define exactly what they meant by a hunger strike. I did point out, at one point, that human beings going more than three days without water can lead to serious problems or even death.
Of course, they never answered, so I didn’t know exactly what they meant. But I got an answer, of sorts, from The Harvard Crimson:
More Than 30 Harvard Students Hunger Strike for 12 Hours in Solidarity With Brown Protesters
By Michelle N. Amponsah and Azusa M. Lippit, Crimson Staff Writers | Monday, February 12, 2024
More than 30 pro-Palestinian Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike Friday in solidarity with 17 students at Brown University who refused to eat for eight days to pressure the Brown Corporation to divest from Israel.
If the Brown University hunger strikers really did refuse to eat for eight days, that is something of an accomplishment. Eight days is not enough for a reasonably health person to starve to death, but it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable after three days or so. But the Crimson telling us that 30 pro-Hamas Palestinian Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike is just plain mockworthy. I’ve gone through plenty of 12-hour-workdays in which I had nothing to eat because I was just too plain busy to take a lunch; that’s something that can happen in the ready-mixed concrete industry.
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and millions of Catholics around the world will be engaged in a 12-hour fast; it’s something we also do on Good Friday. Me? I’m giving up soda for the entire seven weeks of Lent; do I get some kind of political credit for a 46-day Mountain Dew strike? 🙂
Nineteen students at Brown began the strike — which was originally indefinite — on Feb. 2, ahead of the Brown Corporation’s planned meetings beginning Feb. 8.
The students intended to strike until the Brown Corporation considered a resolution to divest from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine,” but they ended the strike[1]Documentary hyperlink added by D R Pico, and was not in the Harvard Crimson original. Given that the paragraph cites the Brown Daily Herald, the failure to include the hyperlink is pretty poor … Continue reading after Brown University president Christina H. Paxson denied their request, citing “now-obsolete demands,” per the Brown Daily Herald.
The 17 students ended their strike at 5 p.m. on Feb. 9, along with the Harvard demonstrators and more than 200 other Brown students who fasted for 32 hours in solidarity.
The Brown Daily Herald Editorial Page Board included an editorial documenting the history of hunger strikes at the University and beyond, noting that very few hunger strikers actually starved themselves to death. But the hunger strike, while an extreme method of peaceful protest, relies on the people against whom they are striking to actually care about whether the hunger strikers suffer, or even whether they live or die.
References
| ↑1 | Documentary hyperlink added by D R Pico, and was not in the Harvard Crimson original. Given that the paragraph cites the Brown Daily Herald, the failure to include the hyperlink is pretty poor journalism from these Harvard journalism students! |
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The Israel Defense Force have rescued two elderly hostages seized by Hamas in the October 7th terror raid, but Associated Press reporters Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy want you to sympathize with the Palestinian Arabs who held them captive!
Israeli forces rescued two hostages in a Gaza raid that killed at least 67 Palestinians
Israel says about 100 hostages remain in Hamas captivity.
by Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy, Associated Press | Monday, February 12, 2024 | 7:37 AM EST
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces rescued two hostages early Monday, storming a heavily guarded apartment in the Gaza Strip and extracting the captives under fire in a dramatic raid that was a small but symbolically significant success for Israel. Heavy airstrikes that provided cover for the operation killed at least 67 Palestinians, according to health officials in the beleaguered territory.
The plight of the hostages has profoundly shaken Israelis, and the rescue in densely populated Rafah briefly lifted the spirits of a nation still reeling from Hamas’ cross-border raid last year that started the war. Israel has described Rafah — a city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip where 1.4 million Palestinians have fled fighting elsewhere — as the last remaining Hamas stronghold in the territory and signaled that its ground offensive may soon target the city.
In Gaza, the operation unleashed another tragedy in a war that has killed 28,340 Palestinians in the territory, displaced over 80% of the population, and set off a massive humanitarian crisis.
More than 12,300 Palestinian minors — children and young teens — have been killed in the conflict, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday. About 8,400 women were also among those killed. That means minors make up about 43% of the dead and women and minors together they make up 73% of the dead.
As Messrs Jobain, Federman, and Magdy lament the “at least 67 Palestinians” killed in this operation, the 28,340 Arabs killed overall, and the “73% of the dead” being women and children, I am reminded of what would have saved their lived, namely Hamas not launching the October 7th terror assault in the first place!
The Wall Street Journal already documented how Hamas were using civilian facilities as shields:
Hamas Military Compound Found Beneath U.N. Agency Headquarters in Gaza
Subterranean complex had air-conditioned room with computer servers, office space
by Dov Lieber and David Luhnow | Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 3:52 PM EST
GAZA CITY—Hidden deep below the headquarters of the United Nations’ aid agency for Palestinians here is a Hamas complex with rows of computer servers that Israel’s armed forces say served as an important communications center and intelligence hub for the Islamist militant group.
For those who are stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can also read the article here, for no charge.
Part of a warren of tunnels and subterranean chambers carved from the Gaza Strip’s sandy soil, the compound below the United Nations Relief and Works Agency buildings in Gaza City appears to have run on electricity drawn from the U.N.’s power supply, Israeli officials said.
A Wall Street Journal reporter and journalists from other news organizations visited the site this week in a trip organized by Israel’s military. A tunnel also appeared to pass beneath a U.N.-run school near the headquarters.
Gosh, I’m shocked, shocked! that the Hamas facilities were drawing power from the UNRWA’s building power. Are we supposed to believe that no one at UNRWA noticed the power drain?
The location of a Hamas military installation under important U.N. facilities is evidence, Israeli officials say, of Hamas’s widespread use of sensitive civilian infrastructure as shields to protect its militant activities. Tunnel complexes have also been found near or under some of Gaza’s largest hospitals.
Israel’s discovery of the Hamas operations below Unrwa offices is likely to put further pressure on the agency, which is facing international scrutiny after Israeli allegations that at least 12 of its employees had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which authorities say killed 1,200 people.
Israeli military officials assert that people working at Unrwa would have been aware of the tunnel complex, either from activities during its construction or by what they said would have been a jump in electricity usage when the complex started operating.
I’m trying to figure out just how Hamas could construct concrete-lined tunnels and excavate the material as they dug those tunnels with nobody noticing? The answer, of course, is that they couldn’t. It took a great deal of effort, mostly by hand, to excavate and line those tunnels, and the obvious question is: if the work effort put forth to construct those tunnels had instead been put to use building Gaza’s housing and infrastructure, how much better would that miserable place have been?
Next to the room with computer servers, which was air-conditioned, was an electricity-supply room fitted with massive batteries, apparently to serve as a backup if power was disrupted.
The electricity room and server room were beneath the Unrwa compound’s own electrical supply room, the officer said. He said wires snaked down into the underground base from the Unrwa compound, allowing Hamas to steal electricity from the U.N agency to power its underground facility.
If Hamas had computer servers in the tunnels, then the odds are that they were also stealing internet services from UNRWA, even though such is not mentioned in the article.
The three Associated Press reporters who wrote this article were certainly aware that Hamas were using the civilian population to shield themselves and their facilities from the IDF, but never mentioned that. They did, of course, have to give us a oh-the-poor-Palestinians bit:
In Hamas’ cross-border raid on Oct. 7, an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, and militants took 250 people captive, according to Israeli authorities. . . . .
Mohamed Zoghroub, a Palestinian living in Rafah, said he saw a black jeep speeding near the Shaboura refugee camp in the town followed by clashes and heavy airstrikes.
“We found ourselves running with our children, from the airstrikes, in every direction,” he said, speaking from an area flattened by the heavy strikes overnight.
Footage circulating on social media from Rafah’s Kuwaiti hospital showed dead or wounded children. The footage could not immediately be verified but was consistent with AP reporting.
A young man can be seen carrying the body of an infant who he said was killed in the attacks. He said the girl, the daughter of his neighbor, was born and killed during the war.
“Let Netanyahu come and see: Is this (infant) one of your designated targets?” he said.
When the fighters use the civilian population as shields, civilians will get killed. This is all on Hamas!
The three Hamas-sympathetic reporters seem to want you to believe that Israel should not defend itself, and should not carry the fight to its enemies. They want you to believe that the IDF’s response is wholly disproportionate, in that 28,340 Palestinians have been killed compared to roughly 1,200, as though this ought to be a matter of competing body-counts rather than a war against enemies. They want you to believe that the lives of 67 Arabs were far too high a price to pay to rescue two Israeli citizens, two Joooos! Stories like this are designed to further inflame passions in the civilized West against the Israelis.
Hamas have made their goals clear: they want to destroy the Jewish state. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has made Israel’s policies clear: they must destroy Hamas. In the end, one has to destroy the other.
Is it any surprise, any surprise at all, that the United Nations agency which has been ‘helping’ the Arabs in Gaza would ‘help’ Hamas in their October 7th attack on Israel? These idiots dedicated relief workers live among the ‘Palestinians,’ are sympathetic to them, probably sleep with some of the Gazans, and are exposed to the same propaganda that the Islamist radicals spread throughout Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.
U.N. agency in Gaza fires employees over alleged involvement in Oct. 7 attack
By Geoff Brumfiel | Friday, January 26, 2024 | 2:17 PM EST
TEL AVIV, Israel — The main United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza has fired multiple employees following allegations that they were involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed some 1,200 people in Israel.
“The Israeli Authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on 7 October,” said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, in a statement.
“To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for “an urgent investigation by UNRWA regarding the involvement of its employees in the terrorist events of 10/7.”
“It is important that UNRWA conduct a thorough internal inspection regarding the activities of Hamas and other terrorist elements in its ranks in order to ensure that the organization’s humanitarian activities are not abused,” it said in a statement.
Neither Israel nor the United Nations immediately provided further details on the allegations against the UNRWA employees. . . .
Twelve UNRWA employees were allegedly involved, according to the U.S. State Department, which also said it has temporarily paused additional funding for the U.N. agency “while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them.”
Early reports had at least 29 Americans killed in the October 7 attack. The Wall Street Journal reported:
In other words, workers for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, used dollars provided by the United States and American taxpayers to kill and capture American citizens.The White House said in mid-December that eight Americans, including three male soldiers, remained hostage, but later in the month, U.S. citizens Gad Haggai, 73 years old, and Judi Weinstein, 70, were declared dead. The husband and wife were killed on the day of the attack and their bodies were taken to Gaza and are still held by Hamas, a spokesman from their kibbutz said.
But let’s be honest here: Hamas are able to exist because the surrounding population support them, support them with food, clothing, shelter, water, and concealment. That’s no surprise: every army or guerrilla group do the same thing, depending upon civilian support. And that means that all American dollars sent to UNRWA have gone in at least some respects to support Hamas. You have been taxed to help kill Americans!
The United Nations were formed by the Western democracies, by the nations which enjoyed the fruits and ethics and morality of Western civilization, in the aftermath of World War II, but other than our Security Council voting status, the vast majority of the UN member nations are not Western democracies, and want no part of — save our economic largesse — Western civilization.
I have long said that the conquering Israelis should have expelled every last Arab from the territories they conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967. It would have been a horrible humanitarian disaster, but such would have left the Jewish State with shortened, more defensible borders, and the displaced Arabs would not have been living under Israeli occupation. If Israel was not willing to expel the Arabs, then they should have just annexed what they wanted — primarily all of Jerusalem, the eastern part of which was under Jordanian control prior to the war — and left the Arabs to live in their own state in 1967.
The Israelis somehow thought that the Arabs would slowly emigrate, rather than live under occupation, but in that, they forgot Jewish history, how very few Jews fled Europe even faced with pogroms, discrimination, murders, and even the Third Reich. We’ve all heard about the Jewish refugee ship, the MS St Louis, turned away from ports in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, but out of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany, the ship carried only 937 passengers. Most European Jews thought that they could ride out the storm of Naziism, with some casualties, but mostly their communities and their people would survive intact. It was simply outside their paradigm that the Nazis really did intend to kill them all.
Knowing that part of their history, the Israelis of the late 1960s should have realized that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs could, and probably would, do the same thing, try to ride out the storm at anchor.
From The Atlantic:
Some Palestinians Want to Leave Gaza. Let Them.
No one should be trapped in a war zone.
by Joshua Krug | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST
Recently, I reached out to a prominent Palestinian activist to learn about his experiences in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He told me that his apartment had been destroyed, and that he lives in a tent with his family. They are under the near-constant threat of bombings, are often hungry, and are worried about starvation and sickness. He wants to leave the enclave—but right now, he can’t.
Several other Palestinians I’ve talked with also want to leave Gaza, and have also encountered closed borders. They of course want the violence to stop, and do not want to be permanently shut out. But above all, they want to be safe. (And I have withheld their names to protect their safety.)
An article in The Guardian this month featured a U.K.-based Palestinian who said his family members were killed in Israeli air strikes and echoed the above sentiments: “I’m not sure why no schemes have been introduced, nothing to evacuate people. I don’t even hear humanitarians talk about this any more.”
Alas! The Atlantic now requires readers to either subscribe or “start a free trial”. Fortunately, the article is also in my msn.com, and can be read for free here.
I am an American Jewish academic based in Germany, and I oppose the forced relocation of Palestinians from their land. Gaza is central to Palestinian history, and I would like people there to survive and thrive right where they are. Still, life—rather than land—should be the ultimate value, a simple fact often lost in the heated debates around the current conflict. I hear calls for a cease-fire and for the surrender of Hamas, but almost never for a safe path out of an active war zone. Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and the opportunity to take refuge outside a war zone rather than serve as martyrs for “the cause.”
There are never calls for “a safe path out of an active war zone” because none of the neighboring nations want the ‘Palestinians.’ Letting the ‘Palestinians’ leave concomitantly means having a place for them to go, and none of their neighbors want people they consider to be murderous trash living in their countries.
The Six-Day War is within living memory in the Arab states, but so is Black September. ‘Palestinian’ guerrilla fighters under Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization escaped east of the river into Jordan used the Hashemite Kingdom as a base to attack Israel, but their presence and politics were leading them into calling for the overthrow of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy and King Hussein. Finally, open warfare broke out between the PLO and Jordanian forces.
Jordan and the other Arab nations get it: admitting large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ means a very probable eventual attempt to overthrow their governments.
Egypt says a mass exodus from Gaza would bring Hamas or other Palestinian militants onto its soil. That might be destabilizing in Sinai, where Egypt’s military fought for years against Islamic militants and at one point accused Hamas of backing them.
Egypt has backed Israel’s blockade of Gaza since Hamas took over in the territory in 2007, tightly controlling the entry of materials and the passage of civilians back and forth. It also destroyed the network of tunnels under the border that Hamas and other Palestinians used to smuggle goods into Gaza.
With the Sinai insurgency largely put down, “Cairo does not want to have a new security problem on its hands in this problematic region,” (Riccardo Fabiani, Crisis Group International’s North Africa Project Director) said.
(Egyptian President Abdel Fattah) el-Sissi warned of an even more destabilizing scenario: the wrecking of Egypt and Israel’s 1979 peace deal. He said that with the presence of Palestinian militants, Sinai “would become a base for attacks on Israel. Israel would have the right to defend itself … and would strike Egyptian territory.”
“The peace which we have achieved would vanish from our hands,” he said, “all for the sake of the idea of eliminating the Palestinian cause.”
President el-Sissi regards Hamas as just another part of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group Egypt has long attempted to suppress.
The ‘Palestinians’ have created trouble wherever they’ve gone, and the other Arab nations really want no part of them; to put it bluntly, they see the ‘Palestinians’ as trash. And nobody wants to live next to a landfill.
We had previously reported on Hamas’ claim that “the fate of many of the remaining 136 Israeli hostages still in captivity has become unknown,” naturally blaming Israel for it.
The terrorists had just released photos of three of the hostages, saying that their fate would soon be revealed, so this is no surprise to anyone:
Hamas says two Israeli hostages are dead, as IDF calls videos ‘psychological torture’ of captives’ families
By Andrew Carey, Lianne Kolirin and Tara John, CNN | Tuesday, January 16, 2024 | 6:03 AM EST
(CNN) Israel said Monday that Hamas is carrying out “psychological torment” as the militant group released a third video in the space of 24 hours featuring the same three hostages being held in Gaza, the last of which appears to show two of the hostages dead.
“Hamas are hit badly by the IDF and all that is left for them is to bring psychological torment to the families [of the hostages], leaving the IDF to clarify things for the families later,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told reporters on Monday. Continue reading
