r/Global_News_Hub

Sources:

https://www.ms.now/news/frame-up-whistleblower-says-probes-into-antisemitism-at-colleges-were-ploys-to-harass-and-strip-millions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQ64YQ5cBg

Report (3 universities were investigated; Columbia, Harvard, and Brown):

• https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/08.17.26-title-vi-whistleblower-disclosure-for-congress.pdf
• Key Findings:
  • Investigators believed Trump DOJ had decided the universities were guilty before the investigations were completed
  • Little to no factual basis of antisemitism
    • For Columbia, officials relied on unsupported allegations from news reports and lawsuit claims and on constitutionally protected speech
    • Investigators found no Title VI violation at Brown, but the whistleblower says administration was subject to pressure from 'outside stakeholders demanding action"
    • For Harvard, officials pursued freezing billions in funding and other settlement demands before the investigation had established Title VI violations.
  • Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official Daniel Shieh noted "the goal is compliance, but pulling money is the tool," communicating that the funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative finding
  • Investigators repeatedly warned that the government was treating First Amendment-protected political speech as evidence of antisemitism

Previous DOJ whistleblowers saying the Trump administration's campus antisemitism inquisition is a farce:

• LA Times - Ex-Trump DOJ lawyers say 'fraudulent' UC antisemitism probes led them to quit
• JOC - Former DOJ attorneys for Trump UC antisemitism investigations quit, calling them 'sham', 'fraudulent', 'political hit job', etc.

Further Context:

• JOC - Post-10/7 only 1 of 102 [126 since 2004] college antisemitism complaints raises claims unrelated to Israel criticism. 78% were filed by pro-Israel orgs as complainants or on their behalf. 15 investigations open based on a single conservative activist with no affiliation with any of the schools.

While the capitalist politicians and corporate media talk endlessly about “the troops,” the sailors themselves are treated with contempt. Asked by a reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Friday whether the deployment had gone on too long, US President Donald Trump answered, “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.” This is the response of a psychopathic sadist who does not even pretend to care whether the sailors he has kept at sea for nine months live or die.

Trump speaks for a ruling elite that has sought for thirty-five years—from Iraq in 1991 through Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine—to offset the decline of American capitalism’s world position through military force, and intends to remain at war indefinitely. The assault on Iran is a criminal operation, illegal under both international and American law, that has inflicted mass death and destruction on a country of more than 90 million people. In the calculus of those who direct it, the endlessly glorified “troops” are cannon fodder—an expendable input, like the bombs and the jet fuel—while the Iranian men, women and children on whom the bombs fall do not figure at all.

The Lincoln itself embodies this history. Launched in 1988, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the carrier has served American imperialism through the entire period of war that opened with the Gulf War of 1991. On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on its flight deck and infamously declared beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” That was a lie.

Twenty-three years later the same ship—with dysfunctional air conditioning, moldy showers, broken toilets and malfunctioning laundry facilities—has been at sea 268 days, logged more than 10,000 sorties against Iran and is now involved in blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Family members, including a Navy-veteran father who told MS NOW his son had personally seen the damage, have reported holes worn through the Lincoln’s flight deck after months of heavy bombing missions.

The Costs of War project at Brown University found in 2021 that at least four times as many active-duty troops and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide as were killed in combat. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 17 veterans die by suicide every day.

The enlisted sailors aboard the Lincoln, like those across the Navy, are drawn overwhelmingly from working class and lower-middle-income families across the country. They enlist straight out of high school or community college for a steady income, health insurance and the chance at technical training and money for education. A sailor at the lowest enlisted rank, after four months’ service, draws base pay of $2,407.20 a month—for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, on a warship in a combat zone. A 2022 RAND study found that one in four active-duty service members experiences food insecurity.

A NSW Supreme Court judge has delivered a sweeping rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, labelling it “verbose and imprecise”.

Justice Desmond Fagan’s initial criticism of the definition came in a decision rejecting the NSW government’s bid to place a young Sydney man under a terrorism supervision order, after finding prosecutors had failed to establish that his vandalism was evidence of a future terrorism risk.

But in the judgment, to be published today, Fagan went considerably further, taking aim at the IHRA definition itself and questioning its use as a guide to whether political language directed at Israel should be regarded as antisemitic.

The pro-Israel lobby, spearheaded by antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal, is pushing for the integration of the IHRA definition across all government levels, the media and education.

The Albanese government acquiesced to the lobby’s demands following the Bondi massacre, and has been steadily rolling it out across the public service while funding Segal’s initiatives to embed the IHRA definition within education.

IHRA ‘detached from reality’

The NSW Supreme Court decision is the latest setback to the lobby’s attempts to stifle criticism of Israel, amid widespread disapproval in Australia of Israel over its ongoing genocide in Gaza, its violence in the West Bank, invasion of southern Lebanon and attack on Iran.

Fagan said the IHRA formulation did not reflect the established Australian meaning of antisemitism and described it as an attempt to “repurpose” the term to encompass both hatred of Jews and criticism of Israel.

He said the definition could not realistically be attributed to the ordinary, reasonably informed Australian, adding that “the IHRA proposal is detached from the reality of the common usage and understanding of antisemitism in this country”.

Citing a Pew Research poll in June, Fagan said that “it would be preposterous to suggest that 79% of Australians are antisemitic because they disapprove of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians”.

He said the IHRA formulation “appears to be an attempt to repurpose the term ‘antisemitism’” as an amalgamated concept encompassing hatred towards Jews and criticism of Israel.

Zionism ‘open to criticism’

Fagan was equally forthcoming with attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“As an ideology of Jewish nationalism, Zionism is open to political discussion and criticism, notably on grounds concerning the rights of the Palestinians,” the judgement read.

This appears at odds with Segal’s antisemitism plan, which specifically highlighted anti-Zionism as potentially masking antisemitism as part of its call for IHRA to be adopted.

Fagan delivered a stinging rebuke to such assertions.

“It may well be correct that ‘most, but not all Jewish Australians’ regard Zionism as ‘a core part of their Jewish identity’,” Fagan’s judgement read. “That does not mean that anti-Zionists are hostile to that majority of Jews on account of their Jewishness; only that they hold a negative view of a political ideology with which the majority of Jews have chosen to identify.”

Limit to government power

Fagan was equally dismissive of the proposition that institutional adoption of the IHRA definition had altered the ordinary meaning of the word.

He cited former NSW Supreme Court judge Sir Stephen Spedley, who had criticised the formulation because it “fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite”.

The fact that governments and several institutions had adopted the IHRA wording did not, Fagan said, “change the established meaning of a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years”.

Instead, he said, the IHRA formulation “propounds a concept different from that which ‘antisemitism’ has long been understood to describe and appropriates that word to the novel concept”.

There was also a legal limit to the power of government policy, he said.

Parliament could enact legislation giving a familiar term a different statutory meaning. But neither the Commonwealth nor NSW parliament had done so in legislation relevant to this case.

The federal government’s adoption of the IHRA core wording as a policy for Australian Public Service workplaces therefore made no difference to the meaning the court was required to apply, Fagan said.

Promoting rejection of Israel as antisemitic

Fagan’s most pointed criticism concerned the IHRA examples dealing with Israel.

Those examples, he said, were “on the face of them” directed towards bringing within the IHRA definition “criticisms of Israel that could not be regarded as hostile to Jews as Jews”.

The result was what he described as an attempt to attach opposition to Israel to the moral force already carried by the word antisemitism.

“Its tendency, and the apparent purpose of promoting it, is to graft onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism, understood as hostility to Jews for their Jewishness, a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel,” Fagan wrote.

That distinction was central to the case.

The prosecution had argued that the Sydney man’s use of anti-Israel slogans, attendance at a pro-Palestinian protest and targeting of areas with large Jewish populations supported a finding of antisemitic motivation.

Fagan rejected the proposition that the political message could be separated from the context in which it was expressed and then treated as evidence of hatred towards Jews.

“You are treating all Jews as monolithic,” he told McDonald during the hearing.

“It’s quite wrong to treat all Jews as supporting Israel, because they don’t.”