Last month, we broke the news about an Israeli plan to maintain buffer zones indefinitely in Lebanon, Syria, and the Gaza Strip. That plan is coming to fruition in Lebanon, our Andrew Tobin reports.
IDF troops “will remain deployed to recently built posts at five strategic locations along the Lebanese side of Israel’s border” past the deadline set by the ceasefire agreement—today—to withdraw from Lebanon. They will stay there to protect Israeli border communities “until the Lebanese Armed Forces are able to fully implement the understandings” of the ceasefire, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said in a briefing.
“We will not allow Hezbollah to rearm and to pose a threat on Israeli civilians again,” he said.
Read more here: Israeli Military Confirms It Will Hold Buffer Zone in Southern Lebanon.
Northwestern Law School funds a number of in-house legal centers that give students “direct experience representing clients” by offering pro bono work. One of the centers—the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, led by Northwestern University law professor Sheila Bedi—offers those students “opportunities to work within social-justice movements on legal and policy strategies aimed at redressing over-policing and mass imprisonment.”
Bedi and her clinic, legal filings reviewed by our Lexi Boccuzzi show, are defending the anti-Israel radicals who organized the blockade of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that shut down travel last spring. The blockade’s organizers are defendants in a class action lawsuit: travelers who missed their flights and were forced to walk miles with their luggage are demanding restitution.
One of the professor’s clients is Palestine Legal “Justice Fellow” Rifqa Falaneh. Like many pro-Hamas activists, Falaneh has celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack and argued that there is no such thing as an Israeli “citizen.” She’s also targeted Northwestern specifically, filing a string of civil rights complaints against the university on behalf of students she claims “have been the target of anti-Palestinian discrimination.” So Northwestern is facilitating the legal defense of an activist who says the school is racist.
“The revelation reflects the surge in anti-Israel activism seen within top U.S. law schools in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack,” writes Boccuzzi. “At Yale Law School, for example, a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter led a campaign to bar a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces from visiting campus, saying the soldier’s presence would make ‘many of us—especially Palestinian Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students—feel physically and psychologically unsafe and unwelcome in our own school.'”
Read more: Northwestern University Funds Legal Defense of Anti-Israel Activists Who Blocked Access to O’Hare Airport
Over at George Mason University, things aren’t going much better for champions of Western civilization. The Northern Virginia school, which has grappled with high-profile instances of pro-terror radicalism, hosted Raz Segal, the Stockton University professor who was booted from the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies over his insistence that Israel committed genocide in Gaza six days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack.
George Mason’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine sponsored the event, which took place in an English department conference room on campus. The Free Beacon‘s Jessica Schwalb attended Segal’s talkon “teaching and conversing on Palestine in today’s context.” In it, he attempted to shatter “this idea that anything that is to do with Jews, the Holocaust, Israel is somehow unique.”
The “idea that Jews are unique,” Segal said, is “problematic” and an “integral part of thinking in an anti-Semitic way.” Those who disagree with that statement would no doubt point to Nazi Germany’s slaughtering of six million Jews. Segal isn’t persuaded.
“When someone raises this in my class, as an assumption or whatever it is, that the Holocaust is somehow different, I take this as an opportunity,” he said. “And ultimately in the class, whenever we do this exercise—and there is a lot of published material about these kinds of comparisons that show us that the Holocaust was not, of course, unique—is that the class reaches the conclusion … that, yes, the Holocaust was not unique, right?” His ultimate goal, he said, is “just shattering this idea that anything that is to do with Jews, the Holocaust, Israel is somehow unique.”
The event came after police found firearms, ammunition, and pro-terror materials in the home of two George Mason SJP leaders—and after the FBI arrested a George Mason freshman for plotting a terror attack on the Israeli consulate building in Manhattan.
Read more: George Mason Speaker Tells Students the Holocaust Was Not Unique
Away from the Beacon:
- ABC: Anything But China. That’s how the Wall Street Journal describes the new outlook of many Western companies: “Now, with U.S.-China tensions soaring again, many tech businesses are accelerating moves to shift production out of China and look for suppliers elsewhere, signifying a global tech world that is increasingly bifurcated between the two powers.”
- More good news: Big banks are “scaling back their public support for diversity and inclusion to avoid winding up in the crosshairs of a legal landscape increasingly hostile toward it,” the Journal reports. “More changes are in the works at banks in the coming weeks, when companies release their annual reports, proxies and other public filings. Banks have also launched audits of DEI policies, programs and events that could open them up to legal risks.”
- Kamala Harris tried to inspire the cast members of Broadway’s “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical” with a pre-show speech. We hope they like word salads. “When we think about these moments where we see things that are being taken, but also let’s see it, you know, nature abhors a vacuum,” she said. Bartender, we’ll have what she’s having.
- IDF officials estimate that “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians” will agree to leave Gaza under Trump’s relocation plan, according to Israel’s N12. Riviera, here we come.
- If you’ve been operating under the assumption that the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, the Washington Post has news for you: It’s “a Muslim holy site where the al-Aqsa Mosque now stands.” Jeff Bezos, call your office.
Read the full article here
