The protest called on school administrators to revoke expulsions given to students involved in violent protests.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, a group responsible for the demonstrations that roiled the campus in the final weeks of this past academic year, held on Wednesday a protest at Barnard College in New York City with a pro-Hamas group that helped organize a violent anti-Israel riot on the streets of Los Angeles this past weekend.

“We demand full amnesty for our Barnard comrades!” the group said in a social media post announcing the latest demonstration, which called on school officials to revoke expulsions meted out to students who illegally occupied or damaged school property and to halt any other disciplinary proceedings.

Only about 20 people showed up for Wednesday’s protest, according to footage of it — a far cry from the hundreds who SJP drew to the New York City area earlier in the year.

Walking in circles, the group chanted, “Long live Hind’s Hall, every fascist state will fall,” a reference to the new anti-Zionist song by rap artist Macklemore, who in 2014 appeared on stage in a costume depicting an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish person wearing a beard and a large prosthetic nose.

He later denied that he intended to cause harm, saying the outfit was a “random” choice.

The title of his new song, “Hind’s Hall,” is a reference to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the building that anti-Israel protesters broke into, occupied, and attempted to rename in April.

Earlier this week, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, an online group which tracks antisemitism in higher education, noted that SJP listed Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) as a “collaborator” of the event.

On Sunday, PYM’s Los Angeles chapter helped organize a demonstration which, it claimed, was an attempt to prevent a real estate auction event at the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily-Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles.

The demonstration was based on the false premise that a local real estate agency was “marketing homes in ‘anglo neighborhoods’ in effort to further occupy Palestine.”

The demonstrators waved Palestine flags and donned keffiyehs while blocking entry into the building.

Many of them also covered their faces in an apparent attempt to avoid identification, chanting “intifada revolution” and “free Palestine” in front of the synagogue while intimidating bystanders.

The scene quickly descended into complete chaos and violence. Anti-Israel activists were recorded shoving, punching, and screaming at pro-Israel counter-protesters attempting to defend the synagogue.

In one instance, a Jewish woman was shoved to the ground and stomped on by pro-Palestinian activists. Another video showed two anti-Israel demonstrators cornering a woman carrying an Israeli flag, ignoring demands to “get off” her.

“Racist settler expansionists are not welcome in Los Angeles! This blatant example of land theft is operating in our own backyard,” PYM said in a social media post stating its intentions.

“The Nakba is ongoing and must be confronted.”

Many Palestinians and anti-Israel activists use the term “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

PYM’s brazen targeting of Jews alarmed Jewish leaders and lawmakers, prompting responses from leading California politicians such as Gov. Gavin Newsom as well as US President Joe Biden.

“I’m appalled by the scenes outside of Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles. Intimidating Jewish congregants is dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American,” Biden said in a statement.

“Americans have a right to peaceful protest. But blocking access to a house of worship — and engaging in violence — is never acceptable.”

Founded — according to Influencer Watch — as a project of Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC) sometime in 2011, PYM is a pro-Hamas group which has spread anti-Zionist agitprop, lobbied members of Congress to enact anti-Israel policies, and attempted to foster insurrection in the US by rallying support for terrorism and opposing development of infrastructure projects such as the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Columbia SJP’s partnership with the group, which is planning to “shut down” Washington, DC in July, has deployed increasingly extreme rhetoric and tactics since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

Last month, it endorsed Hamas, calling it “the only force materially fighting back against [Israel].”

The group’s behavior, which is the subject of a lawsuit filed by the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ), after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel included beating up Jewish students, chanting antisemitic slogans, and stealing missing persons posters of Israelis who were abducted by Hamas.

The SCLJ complaint alleges that after bullying Jewish students and rubbing their noses in the carnage Hamas wrought on their people, the pro-Hamas students were still unsatisfied and resulted to violence.

They assaulted five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library and another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen.

Following the incidents, pleas for help allegedly went unanswered and administrators told Jewish students they could not guarantee their safety while SJP held its demonstrations.

The school’s apparent powerlessness to prevent anti-Jewish violence was cited as the reason why Students Supporting Israel (SSI), a recognized school club, was denied permission to hold an event on self-defense.

Events with “buzzwords” such as “Israel” and “Palestine” were forbidden, administrators allegedly said, but SJP continued to host events while no one explained the inconsistency.

The explosion of end-of-year protests held by SJP forced Columbia officials to shutter the campus in April and institute virtual learning.

Later, the group occupied Hamilton Hall, forcing President Minouche Shafik to call on the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for help, a decision she hesitated to make.

According to The Columbia Spectator, over 108 arrests were made.

The post Pro-Hamas group behind targeting of LA synagogue joins Columbia students for protest at Barnard College appeared first on World Israel News.

The event featured booths with Israeli realtors advertising houses in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, Eilat, which is within the State of Israel.

By Alana Goodman, The Washington Free Beacon

Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.

Lorenz—who covers social media for the Post and often complains about being targeted by online harassment—reposted multiple comments on X, formerly Twitter, defending the synagogue protesters, promoting the false allegations, and slamming the media, including her former employer, the New York Times, for failing to give the allegations oxygen.

The synagogue was in fact hosting an industry expo on real estate investing in Israel, and the false claims that Adas Torah was selling Palestinian land appear to have originated from radical anti-Israel groups, including Code Pink and the Palestinian Youth Movement, according to social media posts.

The groups posted calls for protesters to “stand against settler expansion at Sunday’s real estate event selling homes to build ‘Anglo neighborhoods’ in Palestine.”

Protesters chanted for an “intifada” and called for the eradication of Israel “from the river to the sea,” and violent scuffles broke out.

Lorenz retweeted a post from Talia Jane, a New York-based writer, that claimed the synagogue, Adas Torah, “was hosting a sale of Palestinian land, a strange choice for a place of worship that seems intended to make protests against the land sales look like they’re targeting a place of worship for no reason.”

Jane also denied the protests were anti-Semitic because some of the demonstrators were supposedly Jewish.

Lorenz also reposted a complaint by Assaf Rad, who has worked as a research director at the National Iranian American Council and who said that “every major Western outlet frames this like an attack on a synagogue, while leaving out the part where the synagogue was hosting an event to sell illegally occupied Palestinian land.” Rad has previously accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.”

In addition, Lorenz reposted Alec Karakatsanis, who claimed that a New York Times article about the synagogue protest “omitted that the location was being protested because it was hosting a mega-event on the sale of Palestinian land.” Karakatsanis is an anti-police activist who has accused Israel of “land theft, authoritarianism, and massacres of children.”

Lorenz has been less sanguine about the harassment of journalists, asking her followers on X to “consider supporting women enduring online harassment.”

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I’ve had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life. No one should have to go through this,” she added.

She dissolved into tears while discussing the matter during a 2022 MSNBC interview.

In a separate incident this week, Lorenz also defended former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray’s remarks that the media should report on “Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners,” another unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

Lorenz said this was a “claim that’s being reported all over X,” and Gray was “just asking if any U.S. papers have investigated the claims.”

“It’s not like she’s asking about some random thing, it’s been a major topic of discussion on X all day.”

Lorenz’s social media posts come as the Post has faced allegations of anti-Israel bias in its journalism.

Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that at least six reporters on the Post’s foreign desk previously worked for Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-run news outlet that often serves as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda.

The Post’s embattled CEO, Will Lewis, has also reportedly clashed with the paper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, over the “tone of the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, which [Lewis] and others inside the paper viewed as having an anti-Israel bias,” according to Puck News.

Lewis’s observation, according to Puck, led members of the Post’s foreign desk, led by Doug Jehl, to formulate a “plan to investigate both Lewis and [Robert] Winnett to see if they could unearth unflattering information about the two men’s history in the U.K.”

Winnett, whom Lewis picked to succeed Buzbee as the paper’s executive editor, last week withdrew his name from consideration after heated pushback from staff.

During Sunday’s violent protest—which was widely condemned as anti-Semitic for targeting a Jewish house of worship, with President Joe Biden calling it “dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American”—one individual was arrested for carrying a spiked flag, according to reports.

Noah Pollak, a pro-Israel activist and Washington Free Beacon contributor, was at Adas Torah attending the real estate expo when the protest broke out.

He said the event featured booths with Israeli realtors advertising apartments and houses in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, Eilat, and other communities within the State of Israel.

“There was no ‘Palestinian land’ for sale,” said Pollak.

“Lorenz didn’t make up this claim herself. She got it from somewhere—specifically, from the Hamas supporters who organized the pogrom,” he said.

“Lorenz promoted this lie uncritically, of course having done no actual reporting herself. The Washington Post has become Al Jazeera on the Potomac.”

Neither Lorenz nor a spokeswoman for the Washington Post responded to a request for comment.

The post ‘Al Jazeera on the Potomac’: WaPo reporter Taylor Lorenz boosts defenses of Los Angeles synagogue protest appeared first on World Israel News.