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The New York Post reports today:

The Biden administration, top universities and medical institutions utterly failed to crack down on antisemitism that exploded in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, according to a scathing House Republican report released Thursday, which laid bare "systemic" and "astounding" shortcomings.

Six GOP-led House committees declared in a joint report that "antisemitism has been allowed to fester unchecked" due to "a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial," according to a copy exclusively obtained by The Post.

"Across the nation, Jewish Americans have been harassed, assaulted, intimidated, and subjected to hostile environments — violations that stand in stark contrast to America’s fundamental values, including a foundational commitment to religious freedom for all," the 42-page report says.

The report is the result of seven months of work by the Ways and Means Committee, Education and Workforce Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, and the Veterans Affairs Committee.

The report documents the failures of universities to stop antisemitism on their campuses, to enforce their rules, and to impose appropriate consequences on participants in unlawful encampments on campuses. The report also includes eleven actionable recommendations for universities, the Executive Branch, and Congress to consider implementing.

Read the full report here.

We applaud Speaker Mike Johnson and his allies in House GOP and committee leadership, for making antisemitism, a core issue for the Jewish community, a priority.

Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes for the Jewish Policy Center’s InFocus journal:

At the end of 2020, the Islamic Republic of Iran was down to just $4 billion in accessible foreign exchange reserves. Its terrorist mastermind, Qassem Solemani, and the godfather of its nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, were dead. The regime in Tehran was afraid that its nuclear and missile infrastructure might be targeted at any moment. The ayatollah had halted his climb up the escalation ladder of uranium enrichment for months.

Budgets for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas were down. The Houthis would soon be added to America’s official terrorist list while the US provided intelligence, logistics and defensive support to Gulf Arab partners working to degrade Iran’s terror proxy in Yemen.

The United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain were fully aligned in a strategy to squeeze the source of instability in the Middle East – a coordination that gave birth to the Abraham Accords while pulling Gulf Arab partners closer to the United States and farther away from China’s orbit.

In shorthand, we called this the era of maximum pressure on Iran, but it was much more than that – it was the recipe for peace and stability in a region that has struggled to sustain both for generations.

President Joe Biden immediately reversed the maximum pressure policies of the Trump administration and, as Goldberg declares,"The results were disastrous."

This important article describes the consequences of Biden’s policy of appeasement and the steps that President Donald Trump can take to "to revive his maximum pressure campaign and put the region back on a path to peace and stability."

Read the full article here.

Fox News reports:

A new report cites a laundry list of alleged errors in the casualty tallies that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has issued during the conflict in Gaza, and found that worldwide media widely report the inflated numbers with little or no scrutiny.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a UK based think tank, found "widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process" for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) which has resulted in a "misleading picture of the conflict." The study also analyzed how journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without noting its shortcomings or offering alternative information from Israeli sources.

The HJS report (available here) examined the Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH) fatality numbers and found among other problems: men listed as women to inflate female fatalities, adults registered as children, and natural deaths included in the fatality reports.

The report also noted that 98% of media organizations used fatality data from the Gazan MoH versus 5% who cited the more accurate figures provided by Israel. And fewer than one in every 50 articles about the war in Gaza mentioned that the statistics from the MoH were "unverifiable or controversial."

These false Hamas statistics, widely and uncritically reported by the media, have shaped international public opinion about the war and about Israel. They are part of the information warfare being waged against Israel.

The JTA reports:

Israel is closing its embassy in Dublin in response to the Irish government’s criticism, Israel’s foreign minister announced on Sunday.

…In a statement on social media, [Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon] Saar cited Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state, its support for cases against Israel and Israelis in international courts, and the fact that it has not adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism as reasons for the embassy closure.

"The actions, double standards, and antisemitic rhetoric of the Irish government against Israel are rooted in efforts to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state," he wrote.

In an article for The Free Press entitled, "The Deep Roots of Irish Antisemitism," historian Simon Sebag Montefiore uses his own family story to recount a neglected piece of history about Ireland and Jews.

A Hostage Story

The Daily Signal conducted an interview with Aviva Siegel, one of the Israeli hostages who was freed from Gaza in November 2023. Her husband Keith, an American citizen, remains in captivity. Aviva was one of the delegates from the hostage families who met with the RJC last week. Please watch and share Aviva’s moving testimony. We pray that the hostages will return home very soon!

Abraham Accords Anniversary Highlights Democrats’ Pull Back from Israel

JNS reports on an event this week to celebrate the anniversary of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements that normalized relations between Israel and the UAE and between Israel and Bahrain. The event was supposed to be bipartisan, but Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was the only Democratic lawmaker to attend.

The Democrats’ Anti-Israel Future

Joshua Muravchik writes at Commentary that President Barack Obama’s presidency marked, "a shift in tone, spirit, and perhaps the long-term direction of his party affecting a range of issues, not least Israel." He shows how Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, his Iran policy, and his encouragement of "identity politics" all worked to Israel’s detriment. He concludes that it is most likely, for the foreseeable future, for Obama’s priorities to continue determine how Democrats relate to Israel.

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