The pro-Hamas activist revealed his strong anti-Israel and anti-American stance in a letter he dictated from his holding facility.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The anti-Israel student protest leader from Columbia University who was arrested for his support of Hamas called himself a “political prisoner” Wednesday as a U.S. judge ordered that his deportation hearing be moved to New Jersey, effectively delaying implementation of the deportation orders.

Mahmoud Khalil dictated a long letter from his holding facility in Louisiana in which he excoriated the federal justice system for his arrest.

He said that it was indicative of “decades” of “anti-Palestinian racism” which, he argued, “has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”

Spouting Hamas propaganda, he charged Israel with torturing Palestinian prisoners and both the current and previous administrations with helping to kill innocent Gazans due to their supply of military aid to their ally.

Khalil labeled himself a “political prisoner” who was “born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” which is what Israel’s foes call the country’s War of Independence.

The 30-year-old activist, who worked in the UK prior to coming the Columbia for UNRWA, the Palestinian aid agency that has been discredited by Israel as a Hamas colluder in Gaza, called his arrest “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Israel has said that the claim of genocide is spurious, as fully a third of all those killed in Gaza were Hamas fighters, a two-to-one civilian-to-combatant ratio that is acceptable to all militaries in the world.

Khalil also accused the university’s administration of “surrender” to “federal pressure” and wanting to “silence” him.

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he additionally charged. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

In contrast, President Trump described Khalil as one who had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activities.”

After his arrest in New York on March 9, Khalil was taken to Louisiana, with an eye to holding his deportation case there “hoping for better odds in court,” charged his lawyers, who were provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

They appealed to either release him entirely or at least to transfer him back to New York, to be close to his eight-month-pregnant wife.

Prosecutors had a win in that Judge Jesse Furman did not accept the case’s outright dismissal, and that he ordered that the court to hear all the motions surrounding it should be in New Jersey, agreeing with the Trump-backed lawyers that this correct because the prisoner had been in that state rather than New York when his lawyers challenged his detention.

Furman would not allow an immediate deportation, however, which is what the prosecution really desired, insisting that Khalil had the right to a full hearing first in an American court.

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A federal appeals court had thrown out a $655 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority saying the US lacked jurisdiction.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Supreme Court accepted a case Friday that will decide if the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its main backer that represents it abroad, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), can be sued in the U.S. for terror acts committed in Israel against American citizens.

The hearing will be held in the spring, with a judgment probably rendered around June 2025.

In the original 2015 case, families of terror victims in Israel won $218.5 million in damages for six attacks that took place between 2002-2004, proving that the PA and PLO were materially involved in or incited their execution.

A longstanding anti-terror law meant that the amount was automatically tripled to $655.5 million.

While the district court judge had found that his court had jurisdiction over the defendants, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rejected this decision the next year.

The higher court said that the PA and PLO did not have sufficient contacts with the U.S. to be sued there for terrorist acts committed in Israel.

To correct that gap, in 2019 Congress passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA). This declared that both the PA and PLO are “deemed to have consented to personal jurisdiction” in any civil case brought under the 1992 Anti-Terror law, as long as either group was active in the U.S. and paid the terrorists, or their families if they were dead, at any point after 2019.

The PA has been compensating such terrorists and their families for many years, on a sliding scale depending on how heinous were their acts, in what is known as the Palestinians’ “pay for slay” official policy.

When Congress passed a law in 2014 to defund the PA if it continued the program, the PA simply changed the name of the office funneling the payments to the “PLO Commission of Prisoners Affairs.”

In 2022, a federal judge ruled that the PSJVTA was unconstitutional because Congress “cannot simply declare anything it wants to be [considered] consent,” agreeing with the PA and PLO that the law was improperly forcing them to agree to be sued, thus violating their due process rights.

The Supreme Court will be hearing two cases together, that of Fuld vs. Palestine Liberation Organization and United States vs. Palestine Liberation Organization.

Ari Fuld was an American citizen and prominent pro-Israel activist murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in the Gush Etzion shopping mall in 2018, and his family and others brought the lawsuit under his name.

The Biden administration also requested the highest court’s intervention, saying that the lower court’s actions had undercut Congress’ decision that the PSJVTA was “an important measure to further U.S. interests and protect and compensate U.S. nationals.”

A lawyer representing families in the case, Kent Yalowitz, said in response to the news, “We’re encouraged by the court’s acceptance of the case for review, and our families are looking forward to restoration of the judgment in their favor and a long-overdue measure of justice for the horrific attacks against them.”

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A High Court judge had denied planning permission due to its proposed location contravening a century-old law.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The British government on Friday appealed a High Court decision to prevent the building of a national Holocaust memorial in a park in central London.

“We remain completely committed to constructing the Memorial at this location, which was carefully selected to reflect its national significance – next to Parliament and close to other important memorials including the Cenotaph,” said a spokesperson for the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Department.

The appeal is the latest step in a seven-year battle to construct the £100 million memorial. The design that won an international contest envisions 23 tall, long bronze fins standing close to each other in Victoria Tower Gardens, representing the number of countries in which Jews, Roma, the disabled and gay people were persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.

Each narrow pathway between the fins would lead to the entrance of an underground, high-tech learning center containing survivor testimonies that would also teach about the dangers of antisemitism as well as the causes of later mass murders such as those committed in Cambodia and Rwanda.

The High Court ruled last month in favor of several groups that had argued that a law enacted in the year 1900 forbade using the site for anything other than a public garden. There was an “enduring obligation” to use the land for the purpose for which it had been donated, Justice Thornton wrote.

Barbara Weiss, a co-founder of one of the groups, “Save Victoria Tower Gardens,” said in response to the ruling, “We have argued for many years that the government is pursuing the right idea in the wrong place. Today’s judgment sends a strong message about the protection of public parks.”

While more than 170 members of both houses of Parliament support the project, including Conservatives and the head of the opposition Labour party, the Jewish community itself is divided over the planned memorial.

The umbrella group representing the Jewish community to the government, the Jewish Board of Deputies, is in favor of the current location, as is Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.

Considering the “hateful rhetoric on the rise across the world,” he said, “it is more urgent and vital than ever” to teach what he called “the essential lessons of the Holocaust.”

The potential educational effect of having the memorial “next to the seat of our country’s democracy” should overrule the planning objections that had been raised, he added.

At least eight Jewish peers have publicly stated their opposition, however, as did Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain, leader of the Reform Maidenhead Synagogue near London.

“We know from the resurgence of antisemitism in countries abroad with powerful Holocaust museums that buildings do not change minds,” he said. “It will be far better for the UK to use the £100 million to have an education program in schools nationally than a London-centric memorial.”

A memorial to victims of the Holocaust already exists in the country’s capital and is the site of a yearly commemorative ceremony. Built in 1983 in Hyde Park and surrounded by a copse of silver birch trees, it consists of two boulders lying on a gravel bed.

They are inscribed with a quote from the Book of Lamentations in both English and Hebrew: “For these I weep. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people.”

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Yaron Friedman, bereaved brother of IDF Sgt. Guy Friedman protests outside an Israeli court against the potential release of one of four terrorists who brutally murdered his brother and two other soldiers in 1992.

The post WATCH: Bereaved brother to Israeli court: Don’t release my brother’s killer appeared first on World Israel News.

Issachar’s mother is in Moscow to attend the hearing that may very well determine the fate of her daughter.

By World Israel News Staff

The appeal hearing for Naama Issachar, the Israeli woman imprisoned in Russia for drug possession, has been postponed by a week.

Russian authorities originally scheduled the appeal for Dec. 12 but postponed it due to a request by Issachar to be physically present at the hearing rather than participate via a video feed.

Issachar’s mother is in Moscow to attend the hearing that may very well determine the fate of her daughter.

Despite Russian media reports that claim otherwise, Issachar’s family says that she is in a terrible emotional state at the Russian prison where she is being held.

In an interview with JTA in November, Issachar’s sister, Liad Goldberg, recalled the visit she had with her sibling.

“Physically, she’s safe and everything, but I personally truly worry for her emotional and mental well-being,” Goldberg said. “My mom saw her a couple of days ago and she’s losing it. She can’t really take it anymore.”

In April, Issachar was heading back to Tel Aviv after a three-month vacation in India. She was arrested before her connecting flight in Moscow for possession of drugs after Russian authorities discovered 9.5 grams of marijuana in her luggage.

Despite her denial, Issachar was taken from the airport to a detention center in Moscow. She was then charged with drug possession, which often entails one month of detention, a fine and a ban on entering the country. However, shortly afterward, the public prosecutor changed the charge from drug possession to drug smuggling.

On October 11, Issachar was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times to grant Issachar a pardon but to no avail.

However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Nov. 14  that Putin will consider Netanyahu’s request.

“We know that Netanyahu’s request was received. Once it gets through the diplomatic channels, it will be considered by the Russian president,” Peskov said.

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