A wild boar was spotted with her brood of piglets on a Haifa street.

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A fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the organization has caused “considerable alienation of Jewish students” as well as antisemitism.

By Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner

Jewish student members of the National Union of Students (NUS), which represents over seven million university students in the UK, have experienced antisemitism from the organization’s left-wing pro-Palestinian activists, according to a new report.

The report, released on Thursday and commissioned by the NUS, claims that a fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the organization has caused “considerable alienation of Jewish students” as well as antisemitism that was never properly addressed by its leaders.

“The antisemitism which has been experienced has not been limited to Israeli-related examples such as holding Jewish students responsible for the acts of the Israeli state or comparing Israeli policy to Nazism, but has also seen the employing of ancient antisemitic tropes, from blood libels to Rothschild conspiracies,” the report, written by independent lawyer Rebecca Tuck said.

NUS has long been dogged by accusations of prevalent antisemitism throughout its organizing structure.

In November NUS removed president Shaima Dallali after finding her guilty of antisemitism and other misconduct. In announcing the removal, the first in the organization’s 100 year history, NUS apologized for “the harm that has been caused” and pledged to “rebuild the NUS in an inclusive way — fighting for all students as we have done for the past 100 years.”

Dallali’s tenure at NUS teemed with controversy ever since Jewish student rights groups discovered tweets in which she called Hamas critics “Dirty Zionists” and quoted the battle cry, “Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return,” a reference to the Battle of Khaybar in 628 that resulted in a massacre of Jews.

Dallali has also praised the extremist Islamic preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supports Palestinian suicide bombers and is banned from visiting four western countries and regarded as a terrorist by several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

Prior to the Dallali’s firing, the UK government suspended its relations with NUS and cut its funding.

The report cited dozens of examples of antisemitic incidents alleged by Jewish students, many of which occurred at NUS conferences. Students reported incitement of violence against Israeli civilians, the spreading of conspiracy theories about Mossad’s rumored role in the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), and opposition to a motion proposing observance of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tuck also noted that a core principle of NUS’ progressive culture is the idea that minority groups “define the terms of their oppression,” making it less likely that choosing not to use the IHRA definition, which NUS adopted in 2017, will improve the organization’s relationship with Jewish students going forward. She also acknowledged that “Zionist” is used as a slur in place of “Jew”, with the “insult or discriminatory message still being administered.”

The report recommended exhaustive vetting of candidates for office, antisemitism training, and the hiring of a “facilitator” to mediate conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject she anticipates “will be the subject of student activism, as has been the case for decades.”

“The conclusion of the report is clear: for the past 17 years NUS has systematically created an environment that was hostile to Jewish students and it continuously ignored any calls for action,” the European Jewish Union of Students said in a statement on Thursday. “Now, we call on the National Union of Students to implement the changes and recommendations outlined in the report, and to continue working with UJS to ensure that Jewish students feel included and welcomed in the student movement.”

Another nonprofit, the Community Security Trust, based in Jerusalem, described Tuck’s report as a “shocking indictment of NUS. It is time for NUS to force antisemitism out of its movement once and for all.”

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Israel-related animal conspiracy theories are so commonplace there’s even a Wikipedia page of that name. 

By World Israel News Staff

Spy cows are the latest animals to join the lineup of Zoological conspiracy theories disseminated by Palestinians, with the Palestinian Authority’s official daily publishing an article about a man who encountered bovine “recruited and trained” by Israel and outfitted with surveillance equipment.

Israel has in the past been charged with deploying genetically engineered sharks into Egyptian waters, sending a species of poison-immune super rats to infest the Old City of Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter, and killer dolphins off Gaza’s shores to attack Hamas frogmen.

As recently as this week, Britain’s National Education Union (NEU) revived a boar-related conspiracy theory first popularized by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in 2014 when he insisted that “every night, [Israelis] release wild pigs against us.”

In fact, the phenomenon is so common there’s even an entire Wikipedia entry titled, “Israel-related animal conspiracy theories.”

In the article, published last Tuesday in the PA’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper, Rushd Morrar, a village elder from Khirbet Yanun in Judea and Samaria, is quoted as saying that he had encountered the spy cows near his village.

“These are recruited and trained cattle, as on the neck of each cow they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small,” the newspaper cited Morrar as saying, according to a translation by monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch.

Morrar also claimed that “settlers release herds of wild boars” to destroy Palestinian crops, the newspaper said, as well as alleging that “the settlers’ crimes are diversifying and becoming sophisticated, and the means they employ in their war are unlimited.”

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Honest Reporting is calling on the public to lodge a formal complaint and demand the article be retracted.

By Akiva Van Koningsveld, Honest Reporting

Public opinion polls have long indicated that teachers are among the most trusted professionals in the United Kingdom, with 81 percent of Brits saying they trust educators to tell the truth.

Yet when it comes to Israel, Britain’s National Education Union (NEU) seemingly has no issue spreading disinformation and outright lies.

In the most recent edition of Educate, the NEU’s bimonthly magazine, the largest teachers union gives credibility to perhaps one of the most bizarre conspiracy theories in the history of anti-Israel propaganda: the claim that Israeli “settlers” train wild boars to scare and attack Palestinians.

Reporting on an official NEU trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), delegation member Mohammed Aziz recounts a “tearful” visit to a school in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

“We were told that wild boars are released in and around the camp by settlers to scare children,” Aziz noted after lamenting the class size and apparent teacher shortage.

Where does one even start to unpack such brazen nonsense?

The boar conspiracy theory was first made popular by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2014 insisted that “every night, [Israelis] release wild pigs against us.” Only two months ago, the libel resurfaced in English-language pro-Palestinian publications.

Aziz’s suggestion that Israeli Jews would be raising vicious, wild (and unkosher!) animals for no reason except to terrorize Palestinian kids is, of course, ridiculous. In fact, boar sightings have increased dramatically throughout both Jewish and Arab controlled areas of both the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel in recent years.

In 2019, the northern Israeli city of Haifa reported some 1,300 instances — almost 40 percent more than the 2015 total. According to local ecologists, the pig invasion is caused by humans leaving food in residential areas. COVID-19 lockdowns, which saw public life and movement reduced, exacerbated the problem.

Wild boars have attacked Arabs and Jews alike. In October 2021, a Jewish Israeli had to be evacuated from the West Bank by helicopter following a boar attack near a community in Samaria. Accordingly, even hostile anti-Israel NGOs like B’Tselem and Yesh Din have admitted that there is absolutely “no evidence” to back up the accusations by the likes of Mohammed Aziz.

Educate’s 350-word piece contains countless other errors.

For example, with regard to classroom sizes, the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank is no exception. Last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that Israeli schools had an average of 26.3 students per classroom, compared to the OECD average of 21.1. Many Israeli children, particularly in religious schools, attend classes with 35, 40, or more students in them.

Moreover, Ramallah is not a “camp” — but a city of roughly 40,000, and the place of residence of the deep-pocketed PA leadership. The PA has been responsible for administering and funding education in cities like Ramallah since it signed the Oslo Accords nearly 30 years ago.

Aziz also misportrays Israel’s military justice system, failing to mention that defendants who do not speak Hebrew are appointed an interpreter.

The editors of Educate, which gets sent out to some 500,000 National Education Union members, clearly failed to check their facts when printing Aziz’s baseless libel. Perhaps this has something to do with the organization’s overt anti-Israel agenda: Two years ago, several Jewish teachers resigned from the NEU in protest over its “obsession” with the only Jewish state.

At the same time, Educate has shown itself open to criticism from the public. In September, following public pressure, the magazine retracted a book review, calling it “not consistent with the union’s policy on LGBT+ inclusive education.”

Therefore, we at HonestReporting call on our members to lodge a formal complaint with the National Education Union and, respectfully but firmly, demand that it withdraw “Children pay a terrible toll in Palestine” by Mohammed Aziz.

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What a hog. 

By Debbie Reiss, World Israel News

A wild boar broke into a woman’s home in the northern Israeli city of Haifa on Wednesday, smashing windows and throwing objects while rummaging for food.

“I came home and had a pig in the house,” the woman is heard saying on a video of the boar that has since gone viral.

“It broke the window, it broke everything,” she added.

The video shows the animal clambering through the window before throwing and breaking things around the room.

The tenant is also heard demanding that the Haifa Municipality provide her with a fence around her rental to prevent future feral hog intrusions.

Wild pigs are a growing issue in northern Israel, and in recent years have become increasingly bold, damaging properties, attacking people, and – at least in one case – destroying marriages. A Haifa couple planned on divorcing last year after a disagreement arose about how to deal with wild boars that had entered their garden.

The Haifa Municipality and Nature and Parks Authority warned northern residents not to approach or feed the board.

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The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees such experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization.

By Carla K. Johnson, Associated Press

In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

The patient, David Bennett, a 57-year-old Maryland handyman, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press.

“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

On Monday, Bennett was breathing on his own while still connected to a heart-lung machine to help his new heart. The next few weeks will be critical as Bennett recovers from the surgery and doctors carefully monitor how his heart is faring.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program.

But prior attempts at such transplants — or xenotransplantation — have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection. Several biotech companies are developing pig organs for human transplant; the one used for Friday’s operation came from Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics.

“I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant.

Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees such experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization, available when a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options.

It will be crucial to share the data gathered from this transplant before extending it to more patients, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable,” Maschke said.

Over the years, scientists have turned from primates to pigs, tinkering with their genes.

Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.

The Maryland transplant takes their experiment to the next level, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led that work at NYU Langone Health.

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” he said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

The surgery last Friday took seven hours at the Baltimore hospital. Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery, said the patient’s condition — heart failure and an irregular heartbeat — made him ineligible for a human heart transplant or a heart pump.

Griffith had transplanted pig hearts into about 50 baboons over five years, before offering the option to Bennett.

“We’re learning a lot every day with this gentleman,” Griffith said. “And so far, we’re happy with our decision to move forward. And he is as well: Big smile on his face today.”

Pig heart valves also have been used successfully for decades in humans, and Bennett’s son said his father had received one about a decade ago.

As for the heart transplant, “He realizes the magnitude of what was done and he really realizes the importance of it,” David Bennett Jr. said. “He could not live, or he could last a day, or he could last a couple of days. I mean, we’re in the unknown at this point.”

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The Jewish state is playing a leading role in using a very unkosher animal for medical research, leading to advancements that are saving lives around the globe.

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