University of California Settles With Jewish Students Over U.C.L.A. Protests
In the lawsuit, four Jewish students and a Jewish professor said that the university had countenanced antisemitic behavior at a tent encampment set up in 2024 by protesters demonstrating against the war in Gaza.
The plaintiffs said the university had not intervened when protesters prevented students who were wearing Jewish symbols like a star of David or the Israeli flag or a skullcap from crossing campus. The university even provided the barricades used to keep people out and stationed security guards on campus who sent Jewish students away instead of helping them get through, the court papers said.
Passers-by were given wristbands that allowed them to pass through if they renounced support for the existence of the state of Israel, the lawsuit said. The U.C.L.A. administration allowed the exclusion zone to continue operating for a week, the lawsuit said.
The settlement, announced Tuesday, will require the university to give $6.45 million, including legal fees, to the plaintiffs and to charitable entities. The money will also support the university's own efforts to combat antisemitism and support the Jewish community on campus.
Mark Rienzi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the settlement appeared to be the largest among a set of private lawsuits accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.
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The Hill
17 minutes ago
- The Hill
Authoritarian threats to campus speech come from both abroad and at home
In 2015, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School named Teng Biao scheduled a public event with another Chinese dissident that coincided with the visit by Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, to China. The law school's vice dean for international legal studies convinced Teng to cancel the panel to avoid 'embarrassing' the school and undermining its programs in China. In 2018, the debating union at Georgetown University's Qatar campus planned to discuss whether 'major religions should portray God as a woman.' Accused of 'insulting God,' the university canceled the event because it 'failed to follow the appropriate approval processes and created a risk to safety and security.' Administrators noted that the school encouraged 'civil dialogue that respects the laws of Qatar,' presumably including prohibitions of blasphemy. On March 25, masked federal agents surrounded and handcuffed Rumeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University and a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, on a street near her home outside Boston. They forced her into an unmarked car and shipped her to a detention center in Louisiana. Her apparent offense was co-authoring a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in a student newspaper. The federal judge who ordered her release declared that Öztürk's detention risked chilling 'the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.' These three incidents reflect a disturbing trend in which university administrators seek to accommodate authoritarian regimes eager to silence critics, and the Trump administration works to suppress campus protests and criticism of its policies. In her new book 'Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech,' Sara McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, paints a portrait of 'censors without borders' policing speech, while complicit universities, eager to profit from global partnerships and tuition-paying international students, turn a blind eye or, worse, self-censor to avoid alienating China and other authoritarian states. McLaughlin does a commendable job of calling attention to threats to freedom of expression across the globe, though, in our view, suppression of speech by foreign governments on U.S. campuses is not as pervasive a practice as she makes it appear. At least not yet. In 2023, students at George Washington University posted artwork mocking China's fitness to host the Olympics. When two Chinese student groups complained that the artwork 'insulted China,' the university president, Mark Wrighton, declared the postings unacceptable and agreed to investigate those responsible. After a public outcry, Wrighton apologized, terminated the investigation and declared his support for 'freedom of speech — even when it offends people.' McLaughlin finds it 'troubling that Wrighton's first instinct … was to promise censorship.' But she offers no evidence to support her assertion that the instinct to censor was 'shared by many university leaders.' Nor does she demonstrate that 'sensitivity exploitation' — using the desire to create a welcoming environment for all students to suppress criticism of a foreign government — is having a widespread impact on free speech. In a recent Gallup poll, 74 percent of college students said their institution was doing an excellent or good job of protecting unfettered expression, while only 5 percent believe it is doing a poor job. Of much greater concern is the ability of China and other authoritarian states to restrict the speech of their nationals abroad by threatening their families or, when they return home, their livelihoods or freedom. Universities 'want to reap the financial and reputational rewards' of bringing international students to their campuses, McLaughlin contends, but have failed to 'accept the [accompanying] responsibilities to free speech and academic freedom.' McLaughlin suggests as well that U.S. institutions that have relationships with authoritarian foreign partners often feel pressure to self-censor because 'that is how many university administrations operate: not as values-driven institutions, but as global corporations that must protect the bottom line.' Having 'reached the point where brand supersedes all else, and protecting image matters more than protecting values,' they continue operating campuses in countries 'conducting human rights violations their community members are not freely allowed to teach or discuss.' These broad-brush attacks are, alas, not accompanied by practical proposals for what universities can and should do. How might leaders of campuses in the U.S. 'stand by' international students when their families at home are threatened? How can they protect scholars who lose access to research materials or are denied visas for criticizing authoritarian regimes? Should they insist that the host countries of campuses they operate abroad respect American academic norms in their entirety if the cost is sharply limiting opportunities for their faculty and students, including individuals from the countries in which they operate? Or should they warn students and faculty of the likely constraints on expression and do what they can to minimize them, recognizing that their campuses will not be able to operate as freely abroad as they would at home? McLaughlin acknowledges that the extent of self-censorship by students, teachers and administrators 'is difficult to measure.' And that universities should not 'simply cut off engagement with unfree countries.' Instead, campuses established in authoritarian countries should 'carefully and thoughtfully tailor engagement to limit opportunities for rights violations and interference,' advise students and faculty of the challenges they face, make clear they oppose 'transnational repression' and educate students about how to protect themselves. Good advice, as far as it goes, though that is how most universities already operate. Sadly, the greatest threats to free speech and academic freedom on American university campuses may now be home-grown. Shortly after taking office, President Trump promised to deport 'all the resident aliens' who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted in March of revoking at least 300 visas of students and others whose activities 'are counter … to our foreign policy.' Last month, the State Department directed consular officials to screen the 'entire online presence' of foreign students seeking to study in the U.S. for 'any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.' Red states, eager to amplify Trump administration policies, have adopted a host of educational gag orders restricting discussion of race, gender, sexual orientation and other 'divisive concepts.' Ohio, for example, limits discussion of ' controversial beliefs or policies,' including 'climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.' And last month, a federal judge temporarily enjoined a Mississippi anti-DEI statute for 'possible widespread suppression of speech.' As McLaughlin recognizes, the 'fight against authoritarian influence' is 'a problem that cannot be 'solved,' only mitigated.' Given the Trump administration's approach to higher education, mitigation efforts should probably begin on American soil and with our own government.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is a luxury belief— and utterly divorced from reality when there's a real one happening in Ukraine
Accusing Israel of trying to annihilate the Palestinian people is a luxury belief. Liberals should call out Hamas and Russia instead of carping about Netanyahu and Zelensky. Which do you care more about — victory, or your own moral superiority? Which do you prefer — defeating our foes, or your own home comforts? There are wars raging today. Two democracies — imperfect, no doubt, but free societies by comparison with their foes — are battling two allied tyrannies. Defeat for Israel and Ukraine would mean obliteration, extinction. For the US and the UK, and indeed for the EU, the destruction of Israel and Ukraine would be more than inconveniences. Such outcomes would significantly worsen the West's strategic position and strengthen that of the axis of authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. And yet our support for these two democracies is at best equivocal and at worst hypocritical. Twenty-two months after the slaughter of the innocents by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, murderous appendages of the Islamic Republic of Iran, western liberals join the Iranians and the apologists for Hamas by sanctimoniously and erroneously accusing Israel of genocide. To add insult to injury, the governments of France, Britain and Canada announce their intention — unconditional in the French case — to recognise a Palestinian state when the UN general assembly convenes in September. Not content with passing this judgment on the government of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, they then turn their pious scrutiny to that of President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of being insufficiently tough on corruption — even while western companies continue to profit from their commerce with the vastly more corrupt fascist regime of President Putin, and while the continued flow of western arms to Ukraine depends on internecine wrangles between government departments in Washington. These sentiments can be summed up together under one heading: the new defeatism. They are the moral posturing of politicians and publicists more concerned with flaunting their own confused ethics than with helping the democracies to beat the authoritarians. The phrase 'luxury beliefs' was coined by the brilliant young psychologist Rob Henderson to sum up the more preposterous ideas that progressives can afford to hold — 'Defund the police!' 'Open borders!' 'Men can become women!' — because they are largely sheltered from the consequences when such ideas are put into practice. Accusing Israel of genocide and recognising a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of western foreign policy, elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality. Let us begin with the fallacious claim that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza — a claim long made by Iran and its proxies but now echoed on an almost daily basis by left-wing politicians, as well as a growing number of right-wing populists, and amplified by liberal media from the BBC to the New York Times. This claim is fast becoming consensus. In December 2024, Amnesty International published a report claiming that Israel 'has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians' in Gaza. That is also the view of Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. And the South African government has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The worse the images from Gaza, the more people join the chorus, including now some reputable writers. The Israeli scholar of genocide Shmuel Lederman; Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the British scholar Martin Shaw; the Australian scholar A Dirk Moses; Raz Segal, programme director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, New Jersey; the historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last week Omer Bartov, an eminent historian of the Holocaust who teaches at Brown University, published a representative essay in the New York Times with the title: 'I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See it.' He argues that the Israeli government's goal is 'to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the territory through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.' His 'inescapable conclusion' is that 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people'. Well, as the author of War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (2006), I am qualified to disagree. The war in Gaza is brutal — a kind of siege that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas went on its rampage of murder, rape and kidnapping. One can criticise the way Israel has waged this war. One can note the impossibility of simultaneously rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas. One can lament the extreme difficulty of defeating an enemy that lurks in tunnels, habitually uses civilians for cover and steals much of the aid sent into Gaza. But one cannot call this nasty war genocide. Genocide is a word dating back to 1944, when it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish refugee from Nazism, whose family was all but obliterated in the Holocaust (49 of his relatives died, including his parents; only his brother and his brother's wife and children survived). In her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power movingly described this haunted man's single-handed campaign to turn his made-up word into a foundation of postwar international law. In 1948 it seemed that Lemkin had triumphed when the UN general assembly unanimously passed the 'Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,' though it was not adopted by the US until 1985. Lemkin's original definition of genocide was: a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity […] Article II of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to mean 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such': (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. One may claim that the Israel Defence Forces are doing at least three of these things. But is it the IDF's intention 'to destroy, in whole or in part' the Palestinians as a people? John Spencer, professor of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York, has been to Gaza four times, embedded with the IDF. He has interviewed the prime minister, the defence minister, the chief of staff, the Southern Command leadership, and dozens of officers and soldiers on the front lines. In his words: 'Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent … [Their orders] focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible … [Indeed] Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or cancelled because children were nearby.' Moreover, contrary to the propaganda that the IDF is wilfully inflicting starvation and famine on Gaza, 'Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime.' Omer Bartov is a first-class historian. His book, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (2001), is a searing work. He of all people should understand the fundamental difference between the IDF and Hitler's murderous legions. Now, if it is genocide you want to see, I recommend you pay a visit to the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. There I can easily demonstrate that the Russian government intends to eradicate a distinct Ukrainian identity. That has been explicit since Putin published his essay 'On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians' in 2021. And all five methods of genocide are being deployed against the Ukrainian people, including 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'. To be precise: in March of this year, the Ukrainian government was able to verify that 19,456 Ukrainian children had been taken from occupied Ukraine to Russia since the beginning of the war. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab puts the number closer to 35,000. According to the Institute for the Study of War, 'Russia is using at least 43 children's camps throughout Russia to house deported children, at least 32 of which are explicitly 're-education' facilities.' Evidence from Russian sources shows that many of these children are being put up for adoption, a process that strips them of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces. For teenage Ukrainian boys, forced Russification can lead to near-immediate conscription to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians. The Israeli government does not intend to kill Palestinian civilians. The Russian government does intend to kill Ukrainian civilians. In recent months, there has been an unprecedented level of missile and drone attacks on civilian targets all over Ukraine. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years, with 232 people killed and 1,343 injured. Russia launched ten times as many missile and loitering munitions attacks against Ukraine as in June last year. In all, 6,754 civilians were killed or injured in the first half of 2025, a 54 per cent rise from the corresponding period in 2024. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, HRMMU has documented the deaths of at least 13,580 civilians, including 716 children. I wish those people (including at least one well-known British historian) who spend a significant part of each day posting and reposting clickbait about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza could spare a thought for the real genocide that is going on in eastern Europe right now. But Friday's Guardian captured the twisted priorities of the liberal conscience. The lead: 'The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza.' Well down the running order (below 'Justin Timberlake reveals Lyme disease diagnosis'): 'Zelenskyy calls for 'regime change' in Russia after attack on Kyiv kills 16' and 'Kyiv protesters celebrate as parliament votes to restore anti-corruption bodies' power'. That's right: Ukraine is a democracy. Voters can take to the streets and force a change of government policy. The same is true of Israel, where protests against Netanyahu occur in Jerusalem more frequently than air raid warnings. But what about Gaza? Beginning in March, brave Gazans dared to protest against Hamas's reign of murder and theft. The difference is that these protests were met with violence and intimidation — and they changed nothing. This is what makes French, British and Canadian talk of recognising a Palestinian state such a perfect example of a luxury belief. For nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future. Thirty years ago, under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the beginnings of Palestinian self-government — 'a separate Palestinian entity short of a state', in the words of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of his successors, Ehud Barak, went even further at Camp David in 2000. But then PLO leader Yasser Arafat walked away from the table. Have the Palestinians strengthened the case for statehood in the subsequent years? No. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is an oxymoron; Palestinians despise it, and it has no authority. Hamas continues to enjoy significant support in both Gaza and (some polls suggest even more) the West Bank. True, satisfaction with Hamas in Gaza was down from 64 per cent a year ago to 43 per cent in May, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, but that was still higher than satisfaction with their rivals Fatah or the PA. Asked if they supported or opposed the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, 64 per cent of Gazans said they were opposed. Yet the true nature of Hamas was laid bare on October 7, 2023, which should be regarded — and is regarded by most Israelis I know — as an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it. Nine out of ten Palestinians simply deny the October 7 atrocities took place. A defining feature of with luxuries is that they are expensive. The same is true of luxury beliefs. The belief that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, like the belief that a Palestinian state can be wished into existence by western leaders, is a Hermès handbag of an idea. It is on a par with the belief that peace can somehow be brokered between Ukraine and Russia without the application of meaningful economic and military pressure on Moscow, an idea that is more of a Patek Philippe watch. Expend energy on such luxury beliefs and you will not notice the help you are giving the axis of authoritarians to bring about the defeat of the West. Nor will you notice the help they are giving you — through the social media channels they know so well how to manipulate — to be the useful idiot you are.
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Gaza starvation: Like that meme, we're all trying to find out who did this
As it turns out, humans, even Palestinians, need food to live. But before we discuss such a lofty dispensation 21 months into a near-total blockade of humanitarian aid, a brief bit of levity: For my money, the best sketch comedy show out isn't 'Saturday Night Live,' but former 'SNL' writer Tim Robinson's 'I Think You Should Leave.' Robinson specializes in constructing surrealist, cringe-inducing social nightmares, then extracting side-splitting comedy with an extremely committed performance with a flawless, unforgettable one-liner. One of the show's most memorable sketches, 'Hot Dog Car,' starts with a mysterious hot dog-shaped car crashing into a clothing store. The whodunit is solved within seconds as Robinson emerges with a series of excessive and absurd denials that the car is not his — all while wearing a hot dog costume. 'Now, we're all trying to find the guy who did this,' he claims, rejecting his obvious culpability while clumsily portraying himself as someone zealous to find the real culprit. Epitomizing the Shakespearean embarrassment of a man who 'doth protest too much,' nobody at the store is convinced. Anyway, fun's over. Back to the genocide. Roughly 2.1 million people remain in Gaza, and according to the UN World Food Programme, a third of those have gone multiple days in a row without food. Doctors Without Borders says 100,000 women and children are suffering severe acute malnutrition. Gazans do not have food for the same reason they do not have medicine; for the same reason they do not have homes or hospitals or schools or mosques or churches. It's the same reason they do not have electricity or fuel (which means they do not have water), the same reason they don't have journalists on the ground able to tell you what happened to these things they used to have. While I appreciate those who have acknowledged that no children should have their ribcages poking through their skin — an ideological spectrum that stretches from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump — this reality was obvious to many millions of Americans who took to the streets and student halls in protest months and years ago. As Jewish Currents writer David Klion notes, a larger consensus around the atrocities of the war would have been far more useful then than now. The Biden administration dismissed lawmakers who called for an immediate ceasefire as 'repugnant' and 'disgraceful.' Those who protested the governments responsible for restricting the safe passage of food — including the Palestinians watching their people go hungry and the Jews who bore witness — were collectively characterized as antisemites. As the bombs fell and the food dwindled, then-President Joe Biden insisted Israel 'wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection.' Some who begrudgingly admit that Gazans are starving lay the blame primarily at the feet of Hamas militants who provoked Israel's ongoing siege when they killed about 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 hostages. If only Hamas would simply release the hostages, then everyone else (including the hostages) would have food, the argument goes. Even assuming most spoken and implied false premises about the nature of this conflict were correct — such as the charge that Hamas won't agree to ceasefire proposals or that Israel does not itself have thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charges — it operates under the fundamental logic of collective punishment, a notion that civilians should suffer for the choices made by their government. Consider the implications anywhere else. If you happen to read this on or in our print edition, chances are high that your governor pardoned a white supremacist murderer and agreed to build literal concentration camps. Vile acts of discrimination and tacit support for terrorism at best. Systemic stripping of human rights at worst. All escalations towards lethal violence we all decry. I personally would not like to be punished in any regard for the decisions of any elected official, even one as charming as Greg Abbott. Palestinians deserve that, too. There is no lone culprit or solitary super villain. But since November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court, a judicial body representing 125 countries on charges of, among others, 'starvation as a method of warfare.' None of those accusations stopped a bipartisan group of senators, some of whom mourned the fatally malnourished on social media, from meeting with Bibi and, naturally, posing for the 'gram. Our valiant detectives are assuredly, to quote Hot Dog Guy, 'trying to find the guy who did this.' I wish them well on their chase.
