The legislation responds to NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s threats to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) has introduced a bill that would penalize American state or local governments if they arrest Israelis targeted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The American Allies Protection Act strips them of Department of Justice grant money for four years if they enforce ICC warrants against a current or former government official of a NATO ally or major non-NATO ally.

In explaining the purpose of the bill, Budd specifically referenced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, calling the ICC arrest warrants issued against them last November for war crimes over their conduct of the battle against Hamas “baseless.”

Yet, he said, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly stated he would order that Netanyahu be detained if the prime minister visited.

Just last week, Mamdani had defended his intentions again, saying, “Being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law,” whether the arrest warrant is “for Benjamin Netanyahu or [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

“Mayor-elect Mamdani’s pledge to facilitate the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu is not just ridiculous; it represents a grave threat that could seriously damage America’s relationship with our closest allies and partners,” the Republican senator said.

“The United States is not bound by the morally bankrupt ICC or the Rome Statute, displaying that Mamdani’s comments aren’t based in respect for any law, but rather to virtue signal to his radical, anti-Israel base,” the staunch Israel supporter continued.

Mamdani, who headed the anti-Israel Democratic Socialist Party ticket as well as the Democratic one, has made no secret of his antipathy to the Jewish state and support for the Palestinian cause that seeks Israel’s destruction.

“It is unconscionable that the man elected to lead the city, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, would seek to target Israel’s leader, and Congress must take action to hold any leader accountable should they pursue this blatant overreach,” he said.

As an example of the ICC’s “moral bankruptcy,” Budd pointed out that the court has never issued an arrest warrant of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “who has directly bolstered and facilitated the terrorist activities of Iran’s proxies that have targeted U.S. allies and are responsible for the death of American service members.”

The act allows the president to waive it in cases where an ICC warrant is essential to the country’s national security, after providing “detailed justification” to Congress.

The post New US bill would punish cities that enforce ICC warrants against Israelis appeared first on World Israel News.

If passed, the Rubio and Scott bill would make the Civil Rights Act’s applicability to antisemitism explicit.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algeminer

US Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rick Scott (R-FL) have introduced a new bill that would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover antisemitic discrimination on college campuses and codify in law a policy that was previously enacted via executive order during the Trump administration but not followed through by its successor.

Coming nearly a year after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel prompted an explosion of antisemitic hate incidents in US higher education, most notably at the country’s elite schools, the “Preventing Antisemitic Harassment on Campus Act” would levy “escalating penalties” on colleges repeatedly found to have ignored antisemitism, empower the US Department of Education to “monitor private lawsuits” filed by Jewish students against their colleges, and ensure that colleges respond to antisemitic discrimination as rigorously as other hatreds.

For decades, the American Jewish community was one of the only ancestral groups not covered by the Civil Rights Act even as it expanded to provide protections for women and other minorities.

In 2019, former US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on combating antisemitism that enforced civil rights protections for Jewish students and recognized Zionism’s centrality to Jewish identity.

Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has continuously delayed strengthening the order with all of the necessary Department of Education guidance that would enforce it.

If passed, the Rubio and Scott bill would make the Civil Rights Act’s applicability to antisemitism explicit.

“Colleges and universities claim to value diversity and inclusion but have failed to address dangerous antisemitic incidents that have been plaguing campuses for the past year,” Rubio, the principal author of the bill, said on Tuesday in a press release.

“My Preventing Antisemitic Harassment on Campus Act is a critical step toward ensuring that our educational institutions carry out their responsibility to protect Jewish students from hate and discrimination.”

Scott added, “Jewish students deserve to be safe, and any college or university in this nation that’s enabling antisemitism on campus and leaving students terrified for their safety must be held accountable. Colleges and universities must reject all forms of hate and prejudice and hold those accountable who are complicit in the rise of antisemitism we are seeing on college campuses across the country. I am proud to join Senator Rubio in introducing the Preventing Antisemitic Harassment on Campus Act to address these issues head-on.”

Anti-Israel activity on college campuses has reached crisis levels in the 11 months since Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) last week.

Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report painted a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.

The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents, 52 and 38 respectively.

Harvard University, the University of California-Los Angeles, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10.

Violence, the report continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.

The ADL also provided hard numbers on the number of pro-Hamas protests which struck campuses across the country following Oct. 7, a subject The Algemeiner has covered extensively.

According to the report, 1,418 anti-Zionist demonstrations were held at 360 campuses in 46 states during the 2023-2024 academic year, a 335 percent increase from the previous year.

“Jews and/or Zionists were associated with greed and bloodthirstiness or compared to rodents and other animals,” the report said.

“In one incident on April 19, 2024, at the encampment at Yale University, a protester displayed a sign depicting a shirtless Joe Biden cradling and breastfeeding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is drinking drops of blood from dollar signs on Biden’s bosom.”

ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said that the report’s findings were unprecedented and he called on college officials to address the existential threat campus antisemitism poses to the Jewish community.

“The antisemitic, anti-Zionist vitriol we’ve witnessed on campus is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

“Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidation, and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion. Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality or political views, and they need to start now.”

Other antisemitic incidents from the 2023-2024 academic year included an assault on Jewish students at Columbia University’s Butler Library, a pro-Hamas activist’s spitting on a Jewish student at the University of California-Berkeley, and the sharing of an antisemitic cartoon by Harvard University faculty, a violation of school policy for which no one was punished.

Legislation addressing the issue has, at times, been opposed by US lawmakers, particularly members of the Democratic Party.

In July, Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee all voted against the University Accountability Act (UAA), which would tax universities found to have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to prevent or respond to antisemitic hate incidents.

Both bills were introduced by Republican lawmakers — including Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), and Drew Ferguson (R-GA). Democrats denounced the bill, as well as another addressing campus antisemitism, as inane and potentially injurious to higher education, according to Jewish Insider.

The post Republican senators introduce new campus antisemitism bill: ‘Jewish students deserve to be safe’ appeared first on World Israel News.