“Trump will not stand for having U.S. Navy ships attacked every day by the Houthis using Iranian missiles,” says former Trump official.

By World Israel News Staff

Incoming president Donald Trump will step up American military efforts against the Houthis to curb attacks on U.S. military assets, Israel, and international shipping, according to several analysts.

Since the outbreak of the October 7th war, the Houthis have paralyzed a vital shipping lane near Yemen and launched hundreds of explosive drones and ballistic missiles at Israel.

Under outgoing President Joe Biden, U.S. campaigns aiming to deter the Houthis have failed.

But once Trump takes office, experts say, the Houthis may be forced to stop their attacks.

“President Trump likely will add the Houthis back on the [State Department’s] Foreign Terrorists Organizations list, after President Joe Biden’s wrongheaded decision to remove them, as one of his first acts of president in 2021,” Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Jerusalem Post.

Re-classifying the Houthis as terrorists will allow for harsher sanctions on the group, helping cripple them economically.

It’s also likely that Trump will show a zero-tolerance policy for Houthi attacks on American military assets, which have occurred numerous times during Biden’s tenure.

“Trump will not stand for having U.S. Navy ships attacked every day by the Houthis using Iranian missiles,” Elliott Abrams, who served as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021, told the Post.

“He will hit the Houthis harder, and he will threaten Iran that if a missile [that] Iran supplied kills an American, Iran will get hit directly.”

Trump will probably organize a coalition to stymie the terrorists’ activities, including regional powers like Saudi Arabia, who have a longstanding conflict with the Houthis.

Gulf countries, with the exception of Bahrain, have so far been reticent to join an anti-Houthi coalition because the “U.S. government refuses to give us protection and means to intercept missiles and UAVs if attacked by the Houthis,” Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Post.

“They have been attacking US warships for months on end, not to mention firing ballistic missiles at Israel,” Schanzer added.

“We should expect Trump to reverse the Biden policy, which has been to tolerate the group’s terror activities. I would expect a much tougher policy after January 20.”

The post Trump won’t tolerate Houthi attacks, will ‘threaten’ Iran – report appeared first on World Israel News.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, putting forward a firebrand who has tussled with Jewish groups, was accused of embracing an antisemitic conspiracy theory and associated with a Holocaust denier, according to JTA.

As attorney general, Gaetz would head the government department responsible for investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, including antisemitism.

In 2018, the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Anti-Defamation League both criticized Gaetz, then in his first term, for inviting a Holocaust denier as his guest at the State of the Union address. The guest, Charles Johnson, had publicly doubted that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and suggested falsely that only 250,000 had died of illness.

“This organization is deeply troubled by the comments from Charles C. Johnson, and it is incredibly important for the congressman to acknowledge he is a Holocaust denier and has extensive writings that attest to that and that it was wrong to bring him to the State of the Union,” RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks told BuzzFeed at the time.

The ADL also called on Gaetz to repudiate Johnson’s extremist views, writing in a letter to the representative that inviting Johnson was “an insult to the memories of those killed in the Holocaust, to their families, and to the Jewish community.”

Gaetz denied that Johnson was a Holocaust denier. He told BuzzFeed that Johnson “is not a Holocaust denier and he’s not an anti-Semite. He’s a provoker, I should’ve vetted him better before inviting him to the State of the Union, I regret that I didn’t. That’s my fault. I take responsibility for it. But he is not a Holocaust denier.”

By JTA

The post WATCH: Trump nominates controversial figure for AG, accused of embracing antisemitic conspiracy theory appeared first on World Israel News.

The Department of Education recommended greater transparency because of the concern “that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

By Mitchell Bard, JNS.org

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) in 2020 found that many academic institutions were not abiding by the rules requiring them to report gifts from foreign sources. It was especially interested in contributions from China for both security and political reasons, but also highlighted unreported gifts from Arab governments.

The DoE recommended greater transparency because of the concern “that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

After a small improvement in reporting gifts in the last DoE report by the Trump administration, the latest disclosure by the Biden DoE is even less transparent and allows universities to hide the names of Arab (and non-Arab) sources of nearly $8.5 billion in gifts since 1986.

The Trump DoE found that some of the foreign sources of funding that are hostile to the United States “are targeting their investments (i.e., “gifts” and “contracts”) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda.”

The higher education industry’s solicitation of foreign sources, it disclosed, “has not been appropriately or effectively balanced or checked by the institutional controls needed to meaningfully measure the risk and manage the threat posed by a given relationship, donor or foreign venture.”

“There is very real reason for concern,” the report concluded, “that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.” The department expressed particular unease about reported donations listed as anonymous from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Russia.

Universities objected to the DoE requirement to provide the donor’s name and address, insisting this would “violate institutions’ commitment to donor confidentiality and would preclude institutions from accepting anonymous gifts from foreign sources.”

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos insisted, however, that if colleges and universities “are accepting foreign money or gifts, their students, donors and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom.”

Donation from ‘State of Palestine’ not listed

The January 2014 to June 30, 2020, “Foreign Gift and Contracts Report” published by DoE included a category “Giftor Name.” There were no addresses, only the country from which the donation originated, and few individuals were listed; most gifts came from governments or governmental institutions.

Some giftors were not listed at all, such as the donor (the Munib and Angela Masri Foundation) from the “State of Palestine” to Brown University to create a chair in a professorship in Palestinian Studies. (A separate issue is why the DoE lists this non-existent state that is not recognized by the U.S. government.)

In a Response to Public Comments that is undated but apparently issued after the DoE investigation, the department said it would require the name and address of foreign sources, but agreed to withhold the information from the public disclosure report. Consequently, the latest report covering all public records through June 1 removed the “Giftor’s Name” column. It does contain the name of some foreign government entities, such as the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission.

The source country, but not a more specific donor, is given for nearly 75 percent of all contributions, which represent 90 percent of the total amount universities received from foreign sources.

In The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, I documented Arab efforts to fund universities to influence U.S. Middle East policy, in some cases to apologize for radical Islam and terrorism, and in others to promote anti-Israel propaganda. The public data, however, does not support the more hysterical claims that this funding has contributed to anti-Semitism on campus or the BDS movement. The relatively small number of professors who hold positions in more political fields that are funded by Arab donors and support BDS can potentially reinforce anti-Israel student activity.

The evidence, however, is anecdotal rather than empirical. Most faculty who agitate against Israel do so without Arab funding as motivation (many are not in Middle East-related fields). The truth, at least from what is reported, is that most foreign gifts are apolitical.

So, who is giving the money and where is it going?

$3.5 billion in gifts unreported

More than 80 percent of all Arab funding comes from three countries: Qatar ($4.3 billion), Saudi Arabia ($2.1 billion) and the United Arab Emirates ($1.1 billion). Of the top 25 largest donations, all but two (from the UAE) came from Qatar. The largest was a $151 million contract reported in July 2020 to cover the budget for the establishment and operation of the Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar.

Some 258 institutions in at least 46 states (missing Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Nevada) and the District of Columbia have received Arab money. The top 15 recipients, however, received 30 percent of the gifts and 68 percent of the funds. Cornell is by far the largest beneficiary with 127 transactions worth more than $1.5 billion. It is followed by Georgetown with $725 million, Carnegie Mellon with nearly $674 million, Northwestern with $561 million and Texas A&M with more than $580 million.

Only 17 percent of all gifts list a purpose. Of those, 86 percent were for some type of financial aid or scholarships for students. A total of 65 gifts were for unspecified research activity. Some of the others include training of dental residents and a custom educational program funded by the Saudis, a medical residency for a Qatari national, a neurorecovery therapeutic program supported by the UAE, and an endowed chair for new approaches in neurodiseases funded by a donor from Lebanon.

Only two of the foreign gifts had a political purpose—two contributions to Brown for the Palestinian Studies professorship. Given the high percentage of contributions for tuition and fees, it is likely that many of the unreported and unidentified gifts are for similar purposes.

At least $3.5 billion in gifts have gone unreported, so we don’t have a full picture of the situation. According to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), most of those donations support American universities with campuses in Gulf states. In addition, ISGAP reported that Middle East Studies Centers have received nearly $1.2 billion from Gulf nations. This information is not in the foreign-gifts report.

Biden administration has taken a giant step backward

As I’ve documented, these centers, which educate high school teachers, are often highly politicized and use non-academic materials from sources such as Aramco and the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission. Ironically, some of the most problematic faculty receives money from the U.S. government through the Title VI program to support these centers.

The bottom line is that there is virtually no transparency for the public to know the sources or purposes of foreign funding for colleges and universities making it difficult to assess the impact on campus culture, course instruction or national security. The DoE’s own investigation warned of the danger from the solicitation of foreign money and the lack of documentation.

The Biden administration has taken a giant step backward by withholding information it collects on donors and raises questions about whether it will enforce compliance with the reporting requirements.

Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and an authority on U.S.-Israel relations who has written and edited 22 books, including “The Arab Lobby, Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews” and “After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine.”

The post ‘Very real reason for concern’: Arab donors hide $8.5 billion to American universities appeared first on World Israel News.