Palestinian university slams Hamas-linked students for instructional film on attacking Jews

Short film depicts enactment of the murder of two Jews – a settler and a rabbi.

The Jerusalem Post

The administration of the Palestinian Al-Quds University on Saturday condemned Hamas-affiliated students who made a film dramatizing the stabbing and shooting of Jews.

The short film, which was posted on YouTube, is an enactment of the murder of two Jews – a settler and a rabbi. The first is stabbed to death and the other shot by masked gunmen.

The film was produced by the Islamic Bloc student group, which is affiliated with Hamas.

In is statement, the Abu Dis-based university administration “deplored and strongly condemned the celebrating of acts of violence like killing civilians or religious figures.”

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Students from Across US Visit Israel on Leadership Mission

By: Jspace Staff

A group of campus leaders from 16 universities across America traveled to Israel on an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) mission, giving college students an up-close look at the complex issues within Israel and the Middle East.

The 18 pupils in the annual ADL Campus Leaders Mission to Israel spent eight days in Israel from December 30 to January 6 where they visited Christian and Jewish holy sites, met with decision-makers, government and military officials, diplomats, journalists, religious figures, business people, Israeli and Palestinian students, and ordinary Israelis, both Arab and Jewish.

“Our mission enables some of America’s best and brightest campus leaders to better understand modern Israeli politics and society, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an appreciation for the complexity and nuances of the region.” said Michael A. Salberg, ADL Director of International Affairs. “Many of the students have a great deal of legitimate questions regarding the intricacies on the ground, and this is an incredible opportunity for them to delve right into it and experience the essence first hand.”

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The Higher Education Hypocrisy Award for 2014 Goes to …

Jonathan Marks for Commentarymagazine.com

A New Depth of Anti-Israel Hypocrisy at NYU

It’s a close contest, and there is a bit of 2014 left, but this year’s award for higher education hypocrisy surely must go to eight signatories of the latest anti-Israel petition to emerge from our universities. The petition itself, signed by members of the faculty of New York University, is the standard call to punish corporations that can be connected in some way to Israel’s activities in the West Bank or Gaza. What’s striking about this one is that eight of the signatories, more than ten percent of the present total, are affiliated with NYU’s satellite campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU’s Abu Dhabi outpost, “wholly bankrolled by the oil-rich Abu Dhabi government,” opened in 2010, and its permanent campus, located alongside an “idyllic resort” under development on Saadiyat Island, was completed in 2014.

So I wonder when these eight faculty members, who pompously stand on NYU’s “long and proud tradition of demanding that the university live up to its professed values,” will be renouncing their affiliation with the government of the United Arab Emirates. As Freedom House observes in its 2014 report, the UAE bans political parties, and “criticism of the government, allies [and] religion” is prohibited by law.

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How I Can Still Hope for the Future, in America and in Israel

Derek M. Kwait for newvoices.com

This was a bad week for people who believe in human progress. Whether you imagined America was on its way towards becoming a post-racial society or that residents of the Levant could maybe learn to live peacefully side-by-side someday soon, the better dirt of our nature has again graffitied and burned down our delusions.

What happened in Israel this week struck a particularly personal chord for me. While I was a student at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, two things were routinely emphasized by people who lived in Gush Etzion: The first was that, in spite of what some activists said, Hebron is not a microcosm of Israel, rather tense but much more moderate, much quieter Jerusalem is, and second that the Rami Levi supermarket in Mishor Adumim, where Jewish settlers and Palestinians shop and work together without incident, is how life actually is in the Gush. Both claims matched my experience—the first because the open, festering sore that is Hebron was clearly not like anywhere else in the country, the second because grit teeth and the risk of losing everything are obviously the only things keeping that situation from exploding.

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