An encampment in support of Palestinians in Gaza on McGill’s university’s downtown campus was still going strong on Sunday morning.
Several tents went up after 1:30 p.m. on Saturday and a ring of more than 100 young people formed around the encampment and chanted slogans like “Palestine will live forever.”
So dull.
The Holocaust Memorial in Hyde Park had to be covered and guarded on Saturday as thousands of pro-Palestine protesters marched through central London.
The rock-shaped monument – the first public memorial to the atrocity in the UK – was obscured by a blue tarpaulin, with a police car stationed nearby.
Lord Mann, government adviser on anti-Semitism, described the precaution as “sad but necessary to avoid further offence to the Jewish community”.
Warning contains Naomi Klein Mention…
Several tents have gone up on McGill’s downtown campus in what students are calling an act of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, joining a wave of similar protests taking place across U.S. campuses amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
On Saturday afternoon, organizers could be heard asking over loudspeakers that as many people as possible stay at the encampment overnight.
Protestors are demanding McGill and Concordia universities “divest from funds implicated in the Zionist state as well as [cut] ties with Zionist academic institutions,” according to a statement sent to CBC News by Zaynab Ali, a McGill student participating in the protest.
A pro-Palestinian group has filed a federal lawsuit against Columbia University — saying anti-Israel protesters with the extremist group Students for Justice in Palestine are the ones being harassed on campus.
The complaint comes as Jewish community leaders and Jewish students have spoken out to say they do not feel safe at the Ivy League school with hundreds of protesters camping out in tents on the lawn, prompting university administrators to allow students to take their classes online for the rest of the year.
Outside the gates of Columbia University on Friday afternoon, a man wearing a black balaclava was shouting about Jews.
Security guards, employed to guard the entrance after pro-Palestine students set up an “encampment” at the university in protest of the war in Gaza, looked unmoved by the man’s rant.
“Jews have total control of everything. Inflation is a result of greedy Wall Street Jews,” he shouted, holding a banner depicting an Israeli flag soaked in blood and the word “Nazis”.
Israel’s military says it already looked into reports of mass graves and found no wrongdoing by its forces, even as the Biden administration calls for an investigation into the matter.
Over the past few days, U.S. officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have called for Israel to “thoroughly and transparently” investigate reports of mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which Israeli forces last raided in February. The State Department came under fire from advocates for refusing to call for an independent investigation, instead saying the U.S. will press Israel for information.
In the midst of the Hamas-Israel conflict — while the world’s attention is fixed on the war Iran and Hamas began — Iran’s ruling mullahs have seized the opportunity to advance their nuclear program.
By backing, arming and training Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran launched a proxy war against Israel, leveraging the conflict in part to divert attention from its nuclear ambitions.
NEW YORK (AP) — As students protesting the Israel-Hamas war at universities across U.S. dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, some universities shut down encampments after reports of antisemitic activity among the protesters.
With the the death toll mounting in the war in Gaza, protesters nationwide are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stated that Hamas doesn’t care about the Palestinian people and if they did, “they’d lay down their arms, they’d step aside, they’d release those hostages,” but they’ve refused hostage release offers. Kirby also stated that there have been too many civilians killed in Gaza and the number of civilian casualties “needs to be zero.”
If I didn’t know better I’d say there was an election pending.
Far-left and pro-Palestine extremists mobilized at Columbia University last week for an occupation that’s shut down campus.
Promoters of revolutionary “direct action” chanted explicitly in support of Hamas and urged the Palestinian Islamist terror group to “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”
Over the weekend, a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters were met by a keffiyeh-wearing woman who held up a sign and arrow declaring: “Al-Qasam’s next targets.”
A charge against a Toronto man accused of flying what police called a “terrorist flag” at a pro-Palestinian demonstration earlier this year has been withdrawn.
A 41-year-old man was charged with publicly inciting hatred after marching down Queen Street W. and Bay Street on Jan. 7, allegedly waving the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The organization is listed as a terrorist group by Public Safety Canada, which says it seeks “the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a communist government in Palestine.”
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles has given Premier Doug Ford a deadline to step in and reverse the ban on the wearing of keffiyehs at the provincial legislature or else she says the NDP will defy the ban.
In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, Stiles said Ford has until May 6 to reverse the ban. That date is when the legislature is scheduled to resume sitting.
“We’ve been working to reverse the keffiyeh ban inside the walls of Queen’s Park, but Doug Ford’s MPPs keep blocking us,” Stiles said in the video posted on Friday. “So we decided to give the government until May 6 to reverse this unjust rule or expect us and the community to defy the ban.”
h/t Ontario John
The antisemitism campaigner at the centre of a row over the handling of a pro-Palestinian demonstration has called off a counterprotest on Saturday for safety reasons.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), whose chief executive Gideon Falter was prevented from crossing a road by a Metropolitan Police officer who called him “openly Jewish”, said the force had not done enough to guarantee protection for the rally. In response the force said that the charity had declined to give them the route of its counterprotest during discussions this week.
I’ll preface my commentary with the obvious: All of the “mostly peaceful” protests by our “college educated” on campuses nationwide that are clearly pro-Hamas and aimed at Jewish students are wrong, illegal, and all involved should either go back to the classes their parents and taxpayers are funding or be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Let’s conduct a little thought experiment.
Suppose local chapters of the KKK had established a presence on campuses across America while one of their leaders explained that black people shouldn’t live, they would have all been rounded up long ago. Not to mention expelled, canceled, and rendered permanently unemployable, put on no-fly-lists, and banned from Uber, Lyft, and every form of private and public transportation imaginable.
