Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at media and politicians’ reactions to the out-of-control anti-Israel protests boiling over on college campuses around the country, and cover more media misses.
More on That ‘Excellent’ Leadership of the Anti-Israel Encampments
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) visited the Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Friday and lauded the student activists’ “excellent” leadership. “It’s really special. It’s really amazing,” she said.
And yet that same day, the spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), Khymani James, was banned from campus over inflammatory antisemitic comments he made back in January during a campus disciplinary hearing.
“What is a Zionist? A White supremacist,” James said in the video, which was unearthed by the Daily Wire last week.
“Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” added James, who uses “he/she/they” pronouns. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, and I hope to keep it that way.”
He said he feels “very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for [Zionists] to die.”
“So let’s be very clear here,” the 20-year-old student added. “I’m not saying that I’m going to go out and start killing Zionists. What I’m saying is that if an individual that identifies as a Zionist threatens my physical safety in person, i.e., puts their hands on me, I am going to defend myself. And in that scenario, it may come to a point where I don’t know when to stop.”
This great “leader” was quoted as a representative of the movement by outlets from CBS News to the New York Times. The Boston Globe touted James as an activist wunderkind in a 2021 profile in which he discussed his “confrontational” approach to fighting “injustice.”
And just last week, Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow “Squad” member, Representative Ilhan Omar, was seen shaking hands with James. Isra Hirsi, Omar’s daughter and a student at Barnard College who has faced her own repercussions for her involvement in the protests, was seen hugging James.
James, meanwhile, pulled back on his rhetoric in a statement posted to X on Friday after he faced widespread criticism over his remarks.
“What I said was wrong,” James wrote. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification. I also want people to have more context for my words, which I regret. Far right agitators went through months of my social media feed until they found a clip that they edited without context.”
But in January he said, “I actually kind of hope they do kick me out because I’ve been meaning to travel to South America.”
CNN seemingly ran cover for James, reporting on Friday that his apology came “hours after an interview with CNN at Columbia where James repeatedly declined to apologize for the video, saying that the focus should be on Palestinian liberation.”
Yet CNN did not previously publish that reporting. Instead, in a report earlier that day on “what the pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses actually want,” James was quoted only as saying, “We are not going anywhere until our demands are met.”
Meanwhile, journalist Kara Swisher claims it’s “anti-American” not to support these enterprising young activists.
“The question is, are you for order and against chaos, or for protests and the right to free speech? And what’s interesting is how quickly everyone is shifting. All the free-speech warriors are suddenly like, ‘Order, order, we must have order,’” Swisher said during an appearance on CNN after Washington Free Beacon reporter Eliana Johnson said it would be good politics for President Biden to come out against the protesters making inflammatory comments.
“And so there are heinous things that are said, but there is a line where you have to support also young people, especially when they do things that they do badly. Not to support them is sort of anti-American in a way,” Swisher added.
Becket Adams offered several examples of the media’s attempts to absolve protesters and downplay the chaos on campuses, in this post for NR. The Washington Post says campus rallies calling for the extermination of Israel are “antiwar demonstrations.” While the New York Times reports, “At Columbia, the Protests Continued, With Dancing and Pizza.”
CBS News morning host Gayle King expressed frustration that some “apparently antisemitic incidents” have overshadowed “peaceful protests.”
The Times and King sounded curiously like the Bay Area chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation:
Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace has been present at multiple protests, helping to lend legitimacy to the anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic nature of the protests.
Yet the group’s national Instagram account reposted a photo that contained signs that read, “A curse on the Jews,” according to an English translation.
And the JVP chapter at the University of Southern California held a Passover seder using a seder plate that featured backward Hebrew and containing several items that were purportedly not kosher specifically for Passover, including matzo and grape juice. At least one box of matzo was Trader Joe’s brand, which is made in Israel.
“In our attempt to move quickly and provide support for a Seder in the Streets outside the locked gates to USC, we incorrectly scribed Hebrew copy onto the Seder plate. We want to recognize the harm this caused and take responsibility,” the group said in a statement after eagle-eyed social-media users noticed the backward Hebrew. “We are united in our cause and in our faith and reject the Zionist narratives attempting to delegitimize our Jewishness.”
Students at the Northwestern protest encampment performatively sang a song from the Passover seder on the wrong night — the seder nights for Passover this year were April 22 and 23.
As National Review previously reported, Jewish Voice for Peace has been around since 1996 and describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.”
The Anti-Defamation League has criticized the group for “taking increasingly radical positions and employing questionable tactics in pursuit of its mission to diminish support for Israel.”
NR did a deep dive on the group last year when it was involved in a violent anti-Israel protest outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., which saw one protester arrested for punching a police officer. Six officers were injured in the chaos.
The group lauded the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks that left roughly 1,200 Israelis dead, calling the tragic events “the latest unprecedented wave of resistance” by Palestinians and saying the source of “all this violence” was “Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression.” However, JVP deleted its post after receiving criticism and instead called on lawmakers to examine the “root cause” of the attack, which they believe is Israel. JVP activist Ariel Koren said she believed Hamas’s actions were within “Palestinians’ right to resist.”
Since the start of the Israel–Hamas war, JVP local chapters have been involved in a series of controversial events. At a rally in Providence co-sponsored by JVP Rhode Island, attendees chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, the Yahudi [Jews] have got to go,” and speakers at a Philadelphia rally co-sponsored by JVP Philly said, “The Palestinians and all colonized and oppressed people have the right to armed self-defense” and that “the anticolonial armed resistance out of the Gaza Strip was provoked by decades of Israeli State sanctioned violence and to report it otherwise is false and misleading.”
In San Francisco, speakers at a rally co-sponsored by JVP Bay Area said, “The resistance is liberating land that has been occupied for 75 years. The intifada lives and Palestine lives!”
In 2017, JVP expressed support for convicted Palestinian terrorists Rasmea Odeh and Marwan Barghouti. Odeh, who was sentenced to life in prison by an Israeli military court for planting the explosives used in two 1969 Jerusalem bombings, spoke at JVP’s conference that year. The group defended its decision to invite Odeh, who was released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange, calling her “a feminist leader” and “a deeply respected Palestinian organizer.”
In October 2010, ADL named JVP as one of the top ten anti-Israel groups in the U.S.
“While JVP’s activists try to portray themselves as Jewish critics of Israel, their ideology is nothing but a complete rejection of Israel. In May 2008, for example, members of JVP protested many of the celebrations of Israel’s 60th anniversary that took place around the country, essentially illustrating that they oppose Israel’s very existence,” the ADL explained in a report at the time.
JVP said in a recent report that it doesn’t rely on “corporations, billionaires, or governments to fund our movement” and that it is 92 percent funded by individual donors.
However, JVP has received $650,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations since 2017 to fund its “human rights” work in the Middle East, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Between 2019 and 2021, the group received $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation and $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, according to the pro-Israel group NGO Monitor.
JVP also received $654,233 from the Schwab Charitable Fund, $260,705 from Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, $98,650 from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and $75,000 from the Tides Foundation.
There are JVP chapters on twelve college campuses, according to the ADL, “where members often work closely with chapters of the anti-Israel student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to promote anti-Israel initiatives, messages and events.”
JVP says it pictures a world where “the concrete of the Apartheid wall [is] in pieces on free Palestinian soil.”
“We picture Israeli jails, prisons, and detention centers emptied and dismantled. We picture the return of Palestinian refugees, reuniting with their families and communities. We picture Palestinians — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — living with their inalienable rights respected, building schools and hospitals and planting olive groves with the resources they need,” the group explains on its website.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Denied a Second Chance at a Normal Senior Year,” the New York Times reported last week of the poor Gen Z students facing canceled commencement ceremonies over anti-Israel protests.
“After Covid ruined high school graduation for the class of 2020, the response to campus protests might upend their college commencements,” a subheading explains.
“Members of the class of 2024 say they are once again juggling an altered personal milestone with feelings of anxiety and frustration about the state of the world that lies beyond college. Many of them say they are keeping their own inconveniences in perspective, but the fact remains: The class of pandemic graduates seems destined never to know a stereotypical senior year,” the piece adds.
A comment that 24-year-old Columbia student Sofia Ongele made in the piece quickly went viral online: “Unfortunately, being Gen Z means dealing with repeated states of the world that are in absolute hostility and turmoil.”
“A lot of our milestones have had some big, looming global atrocity over us,” Sophia Pargas, a senior at Emerson College in Boston, told the paper. “It’s almost like we’ve been conditioned for it at this point.”
Apparently Gen Z is the first generation to have ever existed.
Meanwhile, the University of Southern California is the only university to have canceled its commencement ceremony to date.
Media Misses
• MSNBC host Joy Reid claims she carries a copy of the Trump indictments “everywhere” she goes. “I take it around like Trump takes his pretend Bible,” Reid said during Wednesday night’s episode of The ReidOut.
• In an update that could be straight out of a satire website, NBC News’s former “disinformation reporter” Ben Collins has become CEO of The Onion. “NEWS: My friends and I now own and run The Onion. I’ll be the CEO,” Collins said Thursday. “We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff. Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.”
• “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman has reportedly been in conversation with “Linda Goldstein” the “Chief Rabbi of Gaza,” to hold a fundraiser. The only catch? Goldstein is actually a parody account on Twitter, as the New York Post first reported.