While AWAN’s agenda focused on Israel, Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, China, Yemen, the Philippines, and more, most topics had a way of coming back to Israel.

By Jon Levine, The Washington Free Beacon

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) hosted a Marxist, virulently anti-Israel conference last weekend which openly celebrated terrorism, introduced fledgling activists to “the growing BDS movement,” and called on its members to support Iran’s “axis of resistance” and prepare for violence against the United States and Israel.

“We are all here to toughen our knuckles,” Ryan Delaney, chair of communications for Jacksonville Palestine Solidarity Network, told attendees at the conclusion of events Saturday.

“I hope that everybody leaves here ready to fight when they get home,” he told roughly 200 cheering attendees.

Sara Flounders, a member of the Secretariat of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party, thundered to the crowd that “the enemy is at home. … Change doesn’t ask for permission. It’ll be violent. It’ll be stormy. It’ll be unpredictable.”

Flounders praised attendees as “a really militant, determined group.”

The conference, where activists went so far as to discuss how to shut down a major U.S. port to force out an Israeli company, was the second annual gathering of Anti-War Action Network (AWAN), an agglomeration of dozens of local activist groups around the country united by their hatred of Israel and mission to obstruct American “imperialism.”

The Washington Free Beacon purchased a ticket online and was able to seamlessly mingle with attendees for two days without incident.

Though the teachers’ union was not manning a booth, the gathering was held at its headquarters at 1901 W Carroll Ave in the city’s West Town neighborhood. Teachers’ union signage, and even a headless mannequin wearing “Chicago Teachers Union” t-shirts, were present throughout the venue.

Conference-goers were a motley crew of aspiring revolutionaries. About 20 percent wore masks, many attendees were noticeably obese, and there was also a large contingent of openly transgender participants.

Breakfast included gluten-free empanadas and vegan fare while a gender-neutral bathroom did brisk business.

One speaker named Sarah talked about a die-in she helped organize as a sparkling Pellegrino sat nestled in her chair.

Outside the main hall, books like Wage Labour and Capital by Karl Marx and The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, a 2023 book aimed at inducting “a renewed and resurgent communist movement in the U.S.,” were available for purchase, alongside literature on the marvels of Chinese communism.

AWAN Steering Committee member Tom Burke told the Free Beacon that his organization had only rented the space and the CTU had no other involvement in the event, though the extensive teachers’ union signage and branded t-shirts suggested otherwise.

The CTU Foundation, which owns the building, says it “welcomes the public use of its meeting facilities in keeping with the CTUF’s mission to the advancement, enhancement, and support of public education.”

The teachers’ union has long faced criticism for its support for terrorism and condoning antisemitism in its ranks. The CTU vice president, Jackson Potter, has in the past been an apologist for Hamas violence and headlined an event called “Palestine and Union Power” in March 2025.

In May, the union staged a walkout in honor of May Day, a celebration of the worker that’s popular with communists.

In October 2024, the president of the Chicago Board of Education, Mitchell Johnson—who was appointed to the board by far-left mayor Brandon Johnson (no relation), himself a former CTU organizer—was forced to resign after his social media posts defending Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre resurfaced.

“My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment,” Mitchell Johnson said in one post.

The CTU did not respond to a request for comment.

While AWAN’s agenda focused on Israel, Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, China, Yemen, the Philippines, and more, most topics had a way of coming back to Israel. Throughout the entire proceedings, a large Palestinian flag hung over the main lectern.

Rooms inside the teachers’ union building were rechristened by AWAN to honor a rogue’s gallery of personages.

One breakout session was held in the “Rasmea” room—named in honor of Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian terrorist turned Chicago community organizer, who was convicted of bombing a supermarket in Israel in 1969 and killing two people. She now lives in exile in Jordan.

Odeh’s name is back in vogue of late, in part because one of her strongest supporters is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the anti-Israel sociology graduate student who recently won the Democratic primary in a New York City congressional district.

A map of the meeting facility, which guided convention-goers to the different rooms named for various prominent terrorists and dictators, had the name “Chicago Teachers Union” prominently displayed next to a map of Iran.

Child care facilities (spelled “Childare” on the flyer) were held in the Fidel Castro room, where a lone boy looked very ready to go home.

“The U.S. is losing,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and executive director at Arab American Action Network, to thunderous applause.

“What we’ve seen since October 2023 is a radical restructuring of the world order, and it’s happening because of what folks like us have been saying for decades—that the unified Palestinian resistance and its protracted war of national liberation against the Israeli Zionist colonizers is one of the main determinants in the crisis of capitalism and U.S. imperialism, and will help lead to their defeat.”

Abudayyeh is a longtime figure in extremist circles who has in the past called Odeh ​​”my friend and colleague” and claimed that Hamas and other terrorist organizations “constitute the Palestinian national liberation movement.”

During his remarks, Abudayyeh lauded the “principled Iranian support for the axis of resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen,” eliciting more cheers when he declared that “with unequivocal Iranian support, the Lebanese resistance continues to defend its people and land.”

At another moment, Abudayyeh joked that “our elder mentor, Uncle Joe,” was unable to attend—likely a reference to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Flounders, the leader from the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party who predicted “stormy” violence, laid out the importance of messaging.

“As Marxists, we know that change breaks through, change in global communications,” she said.

Flounders then falsely claimed Iran produced the most STEM graduates in the world after China (it is in fact 10th, lagging far behind the United States, India, and a slew of other nations, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology).

The aptly named Flounders then took a moment to note the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Smaller group sessions covering everything from “U.S. imperialism in Africa” to media relations to effective tools for fundraising took place as well.

One session focused on efforts to pressure Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems from its U.S. outpost in South Carolina by targeting the infrastructure of the mammoth Port of Charleston.

“Ports are like integral pieces of the war machine, right? So we need to be in those spaces,” said a representative for Elbit out of South Carolina, a member of the AWAN network.

“If we can shut down even one terminal for two hours, that’s millions of dollars out in logistics.”

A panel on the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement closed out day one of the conference—with members admitting Palestine fever was starting to break among their followers.

“Another challenge that we’ve faced is, generally, I’m sure many of you can relate, is the waning energy of the movement,” said Jae Franklin, a member of the Anti-War Committee Chicago.

That sentiment was seconded later in the panel by Jo Pico of the Detroit Anti-War committee.

“In Detroit, to kind of piggyback off of what Jae started talking about, we also have seen a decline in the Palestine solidarity struggle, which is like, you know, something that’s really upsetting to see. You know, we have like the largest Arab-American, you know, population in the country,” Pico said.

Pico claimed ICE “attacks” in Dearborn and Detroit and “organizational burnout” were to blame.

Throughout the event, attendees were not shy about leaning into lawbreaking.

“The best protests are often the ones that are not always within the confines of the law,” said Chrisley Carpio from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, a line which earned her loud applause.

Conference attendees frequently bragged about past run-ins with law enforcement, often viewing criminal records as a badge of honor.

“I was arrested at the first No Kings event last year for doing safety, and the cops were dumb, and they released me before the event was over. So I was able to get back to the stage when the march was coming back, and I said from the stage, ‘Hey, I was arrested. You guys all heard about it. I have a legal fund. I’m going to need to get a lawyer.’ And they gave me $3,000 in the crowd,” one woman offered during a seminar on fundraising.

On the final day of the conference, AWAN’s member organizations unanimously approved a series of resolutions, including a demand for the release of deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and a demand for the release of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia terrorist Juvenal Ricardo Ovidio Palmera Pineda (aka Simón Trinidad). A main room at the conference was named the “Maduro Flores” room.

Other resolutions included a demand for the withdrawal of U.S. protection for Taiwan and renewed denunciations of Israel.

One attendee said she supported abandoning Taiwan to Chinese domination, citing Stalin as inspiration.

“Lenin was right in saying that the national movement of the oppressed countries should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy, but from the point of view of the actual results, as shown by the general balance sheet of the struggle against imperialism, that is to say not in isolation, but on a world scale,” the attendee said, quoting the communist butcher verbatim.

At the conclusion of events, the Free Beacon enjoyed a capitalist detox of filet mignon, crab-stuffed avocado, and carrot cake at Bavette’s Steakhouse.

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A New York district judge dismissed the professors’ suit in November 2022, ruling that several previous cases have affirmed the constitutionality of compulsory union representation.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The United States Supreme Court has rejected a petition for it to hear a right to work case brought by a group of City University of New York (CUNY) professors who sued to sever ties with the public sector union which represents them and they consider antisemitic, The Algemeiner has learned from a plaintiff in the case.

“For the past three years, our clients have bravely fought for their rights while enduring tremendous pressure to stay silent,” the plaintiffs’ attorney, Nathan McGrath, president and general counsel of the Fairness Center, told The Algemeiner in a statement on Monday.

“They are disappointed that the court did not take their case, but they are pleased that their litigation has exposed union officials’ actions that they consider to be antisemitic.”

The professors — Avraham Goldstein, Michael Goldstein, Frimette Kass-Shraibman, Mitchell Langbert, Jeffrey Lax, and Maria Pagano — five of whom are Jewish, resigned from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) after it passed a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas that declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity.

The professors, however, were required to remain in the union’s “bargaining unit,” due to New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which requires state public employers to bargain collectively with unions.

The plaintiffs argued this amounted to a denial of their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in collective bargaining negotiations by an organization they claimed holds antisemitic views.

Beyond the plaintiffs, 263 other professors and staff have resigned from the union as well, according to the website of the Resign. PSC campaign, which accuses the body of having “violated its mandate” by weighing in on a contentious political issue.

“The core issue in this case is straightforward: can the government force Jewish professors to accept the representation of an advocacy group they rightly consider to be antisemitic?” said the plaintiffs’ petition for writ of certiorari, a legal document that allows a higher court to review a lower court’s decision.

“The answer plainly should be ‘no.’ The First Amendment [of the US Constitution] protects the rights of individuals, and especially religious dissenters, to disaffiliate themselves from associations and speech they abhor.”

A New York district judge dismissed the professors’ suit in November 2022, ruling that several previous cases have affirmed the constitutionality of compulsory union representation.

In appealing the decision, the National Right to Work Foundation, as well its co-litigant, the Fairness Center, argued that the judge’s argument is incorrect.

The Supreme Court’s declining to hear the case affirms that ruling, however, and sees its 6-3 conservative majority forgo a chance to issue a landmark ruling which would have gutted the power of public sector unions across the country.

“I’m certainly disappointed that the Supreme Court did not take our case, but if our openly antisemitic PSC-CUNY union thinks this fight is over, they should think again. We’re just getting started,” CUNY Law professor Jeffrey Lax told The Algemeiner.

“It is outrageous that the same PSC delegate leaders who chant ‘Zionism out of CUNY’ and who virulently support BDS and the illegal, Jew-harassing campus Gaza encampments then argue that they should bargain for our terms of employment at CUNY. In reality, it’s not merely cruel and despicable, it is downright mutually exclusive to openly argue that Zionist Jews should not work at CUNY and at the same time feign to represent the interests of those same Zionist Jews, like me, in negotiating the terms of our employment.”

Allegations of antisemitism at the City University of New York have caused a burst of legal activity in recent years.

Last year, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) resolved half a dozen investigations of antisemitism on CUNY campuses, a consortium of undergraduate colleges located throughout New York City’s five boroughs.

The inquiries, which reviewed incidents that happened as far back as 2020, were aimed at determining whether school officials neglected to prevent and respond to antisemitic discrimination, bullying, and harassment.

Hunter College and CUNY Law combined for three resolutions in total, representing half of all the antisemitism cases settled by OCR. Baruch College, Brooklyn College, and CUNY’s Central Office were the subjects of three other investigations.

One of the cases which OCR resolved, involving Brooklyn College, prompted widespread concern when it was announced in 2022.

According to witness testimony provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which filed the complaint prompting the investigation — Jewish students enrolled in the college’s Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.

The badgering of Jewish students, the students said at the time, became so severe that one student said in a WhatsApp group chat that she wanted to “strangle” a Jewish classmate.

As part of an agreement with the federal agency, CUNY will, among other steps, “reopen” past internal investigations of antisemitic conduct, report to OCR on its progress, and train its employees to conduct “thorough and impartial investigations” of any bigoted conduct reported by them.

CUNY also agreed to issue climate surveys, a series of questions posed to students to measure their opinions on discrimination at their school and administrators’ handling of it.

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Democrats are nowhere near as united and energized as Republicans appeared on Monday, and their presumptive nominee was not doing much to change that.

By Andrew Stiles, The Washington Free Beacon

Thunderous chants of “USA” filled the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, where former president Donald Trump made his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt—his bandaged ear a reminder of how narrowly he cheated death just two days before at a rally in Pennsylvania.

The vibes were great again.

Trump on Monday night joined his running mate—Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio)—among the crowd, and watched as an invigorated Republican Party made its case to American voters.

Speaker after speaker hammed President Joe Biden’s economic record, lamenting the soaring cost of gas and groceries due to inflation and urging Americans to remember how everything was better under Trump.

“Man, there’s a different feeling at this Republican convention,” wrote Steve Peoples, chief political reporter for the Associated Press. “Never seen the party this united and energized. Overwhelming feeling of inevitability in this room.”

That wasn’t the only difference compared to previous GOP gatherings.

Video packages highlighted the concerns of “everyday Americans,” such as “waitresses and waiters, drivers and doormen, bartenders and baristas.”

There was at least a hint of a populist, class-based appeal to working class voters, hammered home by the keynote speaker, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who urged both parties to stop taking advice from “corporate talking heads.”

O’Brien went on to praise Trump’s courage, both for accepting his invitation to speak at the RNC and for the former president’s iconic reaction to Saturday’s failed assassination attempt.

“He has proven to be one tough SOB,” the union leader said.

It was a popular sentiment, emphatically expressed throughout the day. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) delivered impassioned remarks about the power of faith.

“Our God still saves,” he said. “Because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared.”

Scott was one of several black GOP lawmakers who took the stage and blasted the Democratic Party for taking black voters for granted.

Polls suggest an increasingly receptive audience for this message, particularly among black men.

Participants in a recent New York Times focus group of black male voters, for example, criticized Democrats for “treating them like victims.”

Rep. John James (R., Mich.) mockingly paraphrased Biden’s infamous comments about black voters, suggesting “you ain’t black” unless you vote for Trump.

Biden, meanwhile, sat for another interview in an effort to prove his fitness to serve another four-year term in office.

“I’m on the horse,” he told Lester Holt of NBC News. “What I’m doing is going out and demonstrating to the American people that I have command of all my faculties, that I don’t need—notes. I don’t need telepro—I can go out and answer any questions at all.”

It’s still an open question whether Biden will emerge as the nominee when Democrats hold their convention in Chicago next month.

A series of polls conducted before the assassination attempt showed Trump leading Biden in a number of crucial swing states.

Trump’s prospects received an additional boost Monday when billionaire Elon Musk pledged to donate $45 million per month to a new super PAC supporting the GOP candidate.

Democrats are nowhere near as united and energized as Republicans appeared on Monday, and their presumptive nominee was not doing much to change that.

Holt asked Biden what would happen if he suffered another humiliating senior moment like he did during last month’s debate, which caused many Democrats to lose faith in Biden’s ability to win the election.

The president’s response, according to the official NBC transcript: “What happened INAUDIBLE?”

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