BY THE VILLAGE SUN | New York University students calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war held a die-in in Washington Square Park on Wednesday.
In addition to an end to the fighting, they demanded that the Greenwich Village university shut down its N.Y.U. Tel Aviv study-abroad program.
They further advocated that N.Y.U. join the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel, or as one of their signs said, “Divest from companies complicit in apartheid.”
They laid out a list of names of the dead, with small white bundles splattered with red paint — representing slain babies — on top of it.
Around 40 students lay down on the ground. Dozens of other protesters stood around them in a circle in solidarity.
The day before the Downtown die-in, in the largest pro-Israel demonstration in U.S. history, 300,000 people rallied on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., calling for Hamas to release the roughly 240 Israeli hostages still being held in captivity after the terrorist group’s savage 10/7 attack that sparked the war. Around 1,200 people were killed in the surprise assault, many of them with horrific, sadistic brutality. Israel calls 10/7 its equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, Hamas says Israel’s counteroffensive has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians.
Israel has said all the hostages must be released before there will be a ceasefire — plus that a ceasefire would allow Hamas to regroup and rebuild. Israel charges that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields,” saying it hides its command centers and weapons beneath hospitals, among other locations.
The U.S. supports the idea of “humanitarian pauses” to allow aid to flow into Gaza and for Palestinians to be able to flee from northern Gaza. Israeli troops are destroying the terrorists’ extensive network of tunnels in northern Gaza, rooting out their strongholds and targeting their leaders, in an effort to eradicate Hamas.
For their part, Hamas senior leaders recently have stated publicly that the 10/7 attack’s goal was to create a state of “permanent war” on Israel’s borders and that they hope the Arab world’s nations will join in to support them.
When St. Brigid’s church in the East Village was under threat from the Catholic Church in NYC of being sold and gone forever Susan Sarandon stepped up and donated money and protested at the church. Today she was dropped by her talent agency in the US because of her support for Gaza. It has an office in New York City. Address: 888 7th Ave, New York, NY 10106
Please give he our love by organizing a protest at MCA Talent Agency in NYC. They sent her a strong message to shut up and other artists will get the message that if they criticize Israel the same could happen to them. Ceasefire Now !
The truth about Isreal, Jews and Palestinians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNf40sBcvKk&t=110s
Israel’s Agriculture Changing Our World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLztJsk4Pg
Carol Frances Yost begins her lengthy thesis with the obvious ….”I have been an activist on the side of the Palestinians for years,” and yet she claims that she is “against all forms of anti-semitism”…. except her own.
Who is she to define Israel as “a political state” and “not a religion or group of Jews per se,” when we all know that Israel was formed as a direct result of an event which took the lives of six million Jewish people, and expelled us from our homes. Can anyone who is not personally marked by this event, and who does not have to live their life with an invisible Jewish star burnt into their hearts by the Nazis, possibly understand this? Has Ms. Yost ever had to wonder if she lost a job or was blackballed by a co-op board because she was Jewish? Was she ever in love with someone whose parents did not approve of her because of her religion? Does she have a close relative or a parent who survived Auschwitz? Was her father chased down a street in Brooklyn by kids who were hurling stones and screaming anti-Semitic epithets?
I assume that Ms. Yost is neither a Jew, nor a Palestinian, yet she appears to have made it her mission in life to take one side, and virulently revile the Jewish state, Therefore, if she is not an anti-Semite what is she? She certainly is not a pro-Semite, nor is she a benign presence.
Ms. Yost writes that Israel “should never escape being held accountable for its actions”, but barely disapproves of the invasion and mass murders that occurred on October 7. It was “horrible,” she admits, while immediately blaming Israel for responding. Did Ms. Yost applaud Osama Bin Laden on September 11th because “the Land of the Free…has repeatedly failed to uphold freedom for all of its citizens?” Would she like to live as an outspoken woman under the rule of Hamas, or Hezbollah? Perhaps Iran would welcome her!
I had a French friend who was always asking me to read a book that attacked Israel, because it was written by an Israeli. I finally asked him about what his parents did during the Nazi occupation of France, and never heard from him again.
I wonder what Ms. Yost was taught about the Jewish people by her parents, but even her public anti-Semitism is more explicable than the virulent self-hatred expressed by public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman. I once met Ms. Goodman on the street, and asked her if she is Jewish, which she freely admitted to, and so I asked if she could think of one good thing to say about Israel. Just one good thing! If there is anything at all that is redemptive of the Jewish State, I have yet to hear it from Ms. Goodman, or, for that matter, from Ms. Yost.
Hiding weapons under a hospital and using its patients as human shields is considered to be a war crime, if that matters to Ms. Yost, and Hamas prefers to make martyrs of their people, in order to appeal to their international subscribers. Taking babies and elderly Holocaust survivors as hostages, parading naked young women through the streets before beheading them, and every other gleeful atrocity that was committed by Ms. Yost’s friends on October 7th, is simply glossed over.
For that matter, her account of the formation of Israel does not mention the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini ,who met with Hitler, collaborated with Nazi Germany, made anti-Semitic radio broadcasts, and declared war on Israel at the moment of its birth.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating for more just solutions, but their protests were apparently taken as a sign of weakness and division by the terrorists whom Ms. Yost is supporting. By encouraging the extermination of the Jewish State, which is the official policy of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, she is not helping the Palestinian people that she claims to care about.
I am shocked at the lengthy comments. I have been an activist on the side of Palestinians for years, and I am NOT uninformed. I’m definitely against all forms of antisemitism. To label any criticism of Israel antisemitic is uninformed and biased. Israel is a political state; it is not a religion or a group of Jews per se, but a country that acts on its own initiatives. Simply because it was founded ostensibly to provide a homeland for the Jews, a people who had been persecuted for thousands of years, it should never escape being held accountable for its actions, as any other country must be–including our own. The United States was founded as The Land of the Free, and yet it has repeatedly failed to uphold freedom for all its citizens or even for people in foreign countries that have been unjustly invaded by our country.
The Hamas attack was horrible, to be sure, but the Israeli response is beyond horrible, and not a just response to Hamas. Israel really would like to pulverize all the Palestinians on the false claim that Palestinians want to kill all Jews. Israeli officials have recently called Palestinians animals, terrorists, and worse, no matter who they are. I know that most Palestinians just want to live in peace. “From the river to the sea” is NOT an antisemitic slogan and never was. It’s a declaration of the right of Palestinians to be FREE. That’s all. FREE. It cannot be translated in any way as a declaration of war on Israel, or a call for the destruction of Israel. That’s blather.
Israel has never been fair to people who are not Jewish. It drove 750,000 Palestinians out of their own homeland at gunpoint–a land which had been given to Israel without any thought of fairness to all those already living there–as soon as Israel was founded. Israel has continued to oppress the Palestinians who live in the land which Israel occupies–the West Bank and Gaza–even though officially it does not occupy Gaza, because it has complete control over Gaza and allows nobody in or out. Every day or so, before October 7th of this year, Israel murdered a Palestinian unjustifiably, and refused to give the Palestinians the right to build their own homes or have access to their own wells in many parts of the Palestinian territories. The list of injustices to the Palestinians is a very, very long list. People who don’t choose to find out about that, and think that Israel is just and righteous because it was founded as a homeland for the Jews, are wildly deluded. I rejoice that there are many Jews who understand and hate what Israel is doing. Some are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Many of them, I’m sure, are included in the protests these Commenters complain about in righteous tones.
The story of the Palestinian struggle is told in many books. First, read “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” by Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. There are other Jewish scholars who decry what Israel is doing–Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and many, many more.
There is no proof that Hamas is using hospitals, schools, mosques or other civilian buildings as shields or hiding places. The death toll and the threat of death is so staggering that to attack a hospital in the hope of catching a few Hamas soldiers is inexcusable. The doctors at al-Shifa Hospital swear they’ve never seen any Hamas person anywhere on the premises. Meanwhile, people are dying there as we speak, and the doctors fear they will die with them. There is no water, food, electricity, medicine. People are shot at if they walk between the hospital buildings. Finally, at great risk of their lives, hospital staff buried 180 or so bodies to get them out of the buildings because there was no place to keep them without refrigeration. Meanwhile, bodies litter the streets around the hospital, and hungry stray dogs are gnawing at them. Premature babies have died because there was no electricity for their incubators.
If you find the peace protesters inconvenient, well, so be it.
What happened on October 7th was a continuation of more than 1400 years of Muslims murdering Jews in the land of Israel. It had nothing to do with how the modern state of Israel treats Palestinians; which at its worst is better than how most Muslim nations treat their own citizens and immusurably better than how Hamas treats Palestinians. One need only look to the Quran to understand that antisemitism is a fundamental feature of the religion.
The 7th-Century Massacre of Arabian Jews, and Its Legacy
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2021/07/the-7th-century-massacre-of-arabian-jews-and-its-legacy/
Verses and Reality: What the Koran Really Says about Jews
https://jcpa.org/article/verses-and-reality-what-the-koran-really-says-about-jews/
https://jcpa.org/article/verses-and-reality-what-the-koran-really-says-about-jews/
https://www.newsweek.com/jewish-women-were-raped-muslims-christians-medieval-italy-get-ransom-local-jews-study-1709162
https://catholicherald.co.uk/islams-problem-with-jews-goes-back-millennia/
“The depth and intractability of the conflict is well reflected by the comments of the Salafi Egyptian Islamic scholar and author, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Yaqoub:
“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. … They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. … Our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end . .. until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth. … As for you Jews, the Curse of Allah upon you, you pigs of the earth!” (Al-Rahma TV, 17 January 2009)”
Used to be the case that protesters were informed, committed and had a basic understanding of what they were protesting about. No longer. All it takes to motivate and violently enrage the masses of woke, uninformed college students is a meme, a catchy slogan or a dramatic photo (a real photo, a faked photo or an AI-generated photo are all the same to these students.) As numerous people have shown with online video interviews of protesters demanding the destruction of Israel and the Jews, they literally know nothing about Israel, Hamas, Palestinians, the Middle East, Jews or the history of any country, let alone Israel. The “ideology” these pronoun-obsessed “students” ignorantly support is fundamentally a far-left propaganda campaign, funded and organized by groups that support terrorism and that want nothing less than to destroy America, democracy and capitalism — all of which these students completely depend on. That masses of spoiled, ultra-liberal US college students with their phony “diversity, equity and inclusion” mantras could abruptly embrace vicious anti-Semitism as their new “cause” reflects badly on the actual state of education today. Apparently, having Internet access to all the information in the world has been completely wasted on them.
So if they don’t agree with you, they are not informed.
Here’s how they are being informed:
Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, pro-Nazi contenthttps://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/musk-endorses-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-x-has-been-placing-ads-apple-bravo-ibm-oracle
Internet embraces bin Laden and anti-semitiismhttps://forward.com/culture/570120/osama-bin-ladens-letter-to-america-israel-tiktok-antisemitism/?
As a human being, an artist and an old anti-war protestor, I can certainly understand why everyone should be opposed to war and murder. Tragically, Hamas decided that peaceful co-existence was impossible, and Israel has been savagely invaded. Innocent farmers and dancers at a peace festival were murdered, babies, Holocaust survivors were murdered and taken hostage, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been displaced. No nation can exist if it cannot defend itself.
The young people who are holding signs with garbage cans filled with Jewish stars, demanding that the world rid itself of “filth,” or those who are ready to use “any means necessary” to exterminate Jews and destroy a nation with millions of people, are not anti-war demonstrators. They are anti-Semite demonstrators.
Genocide, by definition, is the intention to destroy a people or a nation. That is not the position of Israel, but it is the stated position of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and, apparently, New York University.
Washington Square Park shall forever be remembered as a place where voices rose in unison to expose Southern racism and hypocrisy. Rabbi Heschel marched alongside Dr. King, while Jews boarded buses to risk their lives as Freedom Riders. Yet, today we see the grandchildren of those victims of racism holding virulently anti-Semitic posters in that very park. Do they even realize that “from the river to the sea” means exterminating the Jewish people?
NYU and every other institution of so-called higher education should require courses on the history of anti-Semitism, the civil rights movement and the Holocaust.
Hamas has not only vowed to kill Jews, and “martyr” their own people, but they also want to destroy our country, repress women and destroy the LGBTQ community. Is this really what you want to lay down for?