Our nation just witnessed the tragic shooting of Charlie Kirk, who was not only a leading voice for conservatives but was a bold believer and passionate advocate for faith in Jesus Christ and a Christian worldview. It’s been barely two weeks since a mentally ill individual terrorized the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring 18 others.
Unfortunately, these two incidents are just the most recent examples of how religious persecution, once a threat continents away, has arrived on the doorstep of faithful Americans.
Over the past several years, religious persecution has risen sharply worldwide. Last year, <a href="https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/">380 million Christians</a> around the world faced “high levels” of persecution. According to <a href="https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/">Open Doors</a>, that number is up 15 million from the previous year. That is the highest number ever recorded. But Christians are not the only religious group facing a steep surge in hostilities. Jews around the world are experiencing a dramatic increase in victimization as well after Hamas’s grisly attack against Israel on October 7. <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/report/top-5-global-antisemitic-trends-october-7-one-year-impact-report">Antisemitic incidents skyrocketed</a> around the globe, particularly in Europe, where reports of antisemitism rose by <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/report/top-5-global-antisemitic-trends-october-7-one-year-impact-report">1,000% in some countries</a>. 
According to the <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/us-antisemitic-incidents-skyrocketed-360-aftermath-attack-israel-according">Anti-Defamation League</a>, antisemitism has jumped 361% in the United States. That trend began in 2013 but has dramatically increased in the months and years following the October 7 attack. Hostility has also surged against Christians and churches. A report published by the <a href="https://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF25H55.pdf">Family Research Council</a> found that incidents of violence against churches have gone up 740% since 2018.
The data alone shows a concerning rise in hostility against people of faith, but people of faith themselves are also feeling the effects. A recent American Jewish Committee <a href="https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2024/GeneralPublic">survey </a>of American Jews revealed that more Jews in America feel the threat. In the survey, 92% of the participants expressed that antisemitism had increased over the past five years. Among the general public, the survey found that 71% of the participants believe that antisemitism is a growing problem.
Christians are feeling the pressure, too. Over the past 16 years, the Survey Center on American Life has tracked Christians’ feelings of discrimination. In <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-most-evangelicals-say-they-face-a-lot-of-discrimination/#:~:text=Daniel%20A.,less%20than%20they%20used%20to.">2009</a>, the survey found that most evangelical Christians rejected the notion that they were experiencing discrimination, with only about four in ten (42%) saying Christians faced “a lot of discrimination.”
Over the next decade, that number had rapidly shifted. By <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-most-evangelicals-say-they-face-a-lot-of-discrimination/#:~:text=Daniel%20A.,less%20than%20they%20used%20to.">2023</a>, most Christians said they were experiencing discrimination. The number jumped to 60% when asked if they had experienced “a lot of discrimination.”
I’ve spent years working and ministering in the most dangerous places in the world for Christians to live. I am acutely aware of what religious persecution looks like and what it is like to live under religious oppression. In Northern Nigeria, a place where more Christians are killed for their faith than anywhere else in the world, I see the impact of persecution every day.
Persecution doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a slow, gradual process that takes time. It begins by marginalizing people of faith, rendering them lower-class citizens. We saw this in Nazi Germany when the propaganda against Jews portrayed them as less than human. We can see it today in how people of faith are portrayed in modern mainstream media. Christians and Jews are often portrayed in a negative light and are labeled as traditional oppressors who want to stunt culture’s inevitable evolution. 
These sentiments, in turn, create general hostilities toward people of faith. And when hostilities happen (like the recent Annunciation Catholic School shooting or the Covenant School shooting in 2023), the mainstream media largely ignores them or misrepresents the motives behind the attacks. As hostilities grow and aggressors feel they can get away with acts of discrimination and violence, the cycle continues to spiral to a fever pitch.
I’ve seen this cycle play out time and again in Northern Nigeria. In just 10 short years, Nigeria has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian.
What is often not accounted for, however, is the positive effect that persecution can have on the faith community.
Persecution often produces an indelible resolve among people of faith. When experiencing persecution, people of faith can become more resilient and deepen their faith. Tertullian said it this way, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
Throughout history, this phenomenon has been observed in both Christian and Jewish cultures. The more they are persecuted, the more resolute they become, growing not only in faith but in numbers as well. The key for people of faith to endure the persecution of our day is to use the hostilities, discrimination, and violence as a motivation to stand firm in their beliefs.
All of us in the faith community should realize that acts of hostility only validate the legitimacy of our Judeo-Christian values and the spiritual battle we are in. Scripture teaches us that true believers will suffer persecution (2 Timothy 3:12, Matthew 5:10). It also encourages us to stand up in those times and resolve never to back down, no matter the cost (Ephesians 6:12).
* * *
<a href="https://www.acrossnigeria.org/ourfounder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brad Brandon</a> is the founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.acrossnigeria.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Across Nigeria</a>. Since 2018, he has been actively serving in predominantly high-risk, highly persecuted areas like Northern Nigeria and other parts of West Africa.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Church memorial for the mass shooting victims that killed two children and injured 21 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Why Christians And Jews Are Facing A New Wave Of Hostility

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When people say “political violence is wrong,” does that change the underlying substructure of thought that leads to a massive elevation in violence in the country of the political variety?
I don&#8217;t think it means anything to just say that political violence is wrong, because there are actual substrates of thought that lead to the elevation of the violence that compel fringe actors to go out and do things like murder Charlie Kirk.
Thus, having our politicians simply go out there and say, “We&#8217;ve got to take down the temperature; we all have to use better language,” is absolutely true, but it isn&#8217;t specific enough.
Chuck Schumer said, “The bottom line is this is a time that all Americans should come together and feel and mourn what happened. Violence, which affects so many different people of so many different political persuasions, is an affliction of America, and coming together is what we ought to be doing, not pointing fingers of blame.”
Hakeem Jeffries said, “This moment requires leadership that brings the American people together, as opposed to trying to further divide us. Political violence in any form against any American is unacceptable, and should be denounced by everyone. And moving forward, we have to figure out a better way to come together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.”
All of this is correct.
But all of this is incredibly vague.
I want to talk about something that we all know is true, but nobody seems to want to say: Not all ideologies are equally prone to violence.
When there is a shooting, a mass shooting at a synagogue, a mass shooting at a church, when Charlie Kirk is shot, everybody&#8217;s mind immediately goes to this: What are the likeliest probabilities in terms of who did the shooting? 
Everyone does this. We cannot pretend that we are blind to the realities of the world. When there is a shooting at a synagogue, I can tell you my mind goes to two places: radical Muslim or white supremacist. Those are usually the options. If there&#8217;s a shooting at a church, your mind might go to a trans radical or a radical Muslim. 
That&#8217;s where your mind is going to go. And this is leaving aside people who are generally mentally ill or where there&#8217;s no political ideology involved. If there is a political ideology involved, your mind immediately goes to the movements that are likely to drive people toward murder.
Not every ideology is prone to this. No one thought that when Charlie Kirk was shot, it was because of his stance on low taxes. No one thought that. We differ on all sorts of politics in this country. Nobody thought that a debate about marginal tax rates was why Charlie was shot. Nobody believes Charlie Kirk was murdered because of his stance on energy policy. 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2279-breaking-charlie-kirk-assassin-in-custody?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
In order for an ideology, for a movement to coalesce in such a way that it allows for violence — the sort of bubbling of violence that lies at the outskirts of a movement — there have to be some preconditions.
I&#8217;ve been talking a lot about lions and scavengers. What we are seeing here is the scavengers at work. 
The basic philosophy of the scavenger is very simple: All models and civilizations are merely guises for power. My failure is a result of one of those corrupt power systems. There&#8217;s a great conspiracy out there. I am the victim. I&#8217;m being targeted. I am the actual victim. 
And thus, if there is a great conspiracy that is targeting me for destruction, I must respond in kind with violence.
This is how you get to the idiotic notion that speech is violence. 
Those are the three elements: “Morals and civilizations that I don&#8217;t like are simply guises for power,” “My failure within that system is a result of that great conspiracy and I am the victim,” and “It is an existential threat to me and therefore I must act out with violence and harm somebody.”
Let me give you three examples, and I&#8217;m going to take them from the top death threats I received. 
I receive an enormous number of death threats. I have 24/7 security on me, on my family. I literally go nowhere without an entire team of security at this point in my life. And that is because of things like what happened to Charlie.
There are three main wings that I get these threats from: Trans ideology/Marxist ideology, white supremacists, and radical Muslims. 
I want to go through each one of those and explain why these particular ideologies, why these particular movements are likely to generate violence. 
A trans ideology says that your argument about biology, that there is simply male and female, is, in fact, a guise for power. You&#8217;re doing it because you hate me; you wish to erase me. I am a victim of your failure to accept my identity, such that you&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re engaging in a “trans genocide,” and therefore, you are threatening me. Your speech is a form of violence. It is wiping away my identity. 
And therefore violence ought to be met with violence.
Marxist ideology, which is derived from the same general area, is the idea that the governmental system, the free market system, is an imposition on me. It is a conspiracy from above to harm me, to destroy me. My failures inside the market are actually not my own. They&#8217;re the fault of the system. And you, as an advocate for the system, are victimizing me. You&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re destroying me. And I must act with violence. There&#8217;s a reason why Marxist movements are so violent. They say that speech, advocacy for the free market, is, in fact, a system of power. It is to be met with violence. 
White supremacy: I know that there&#8217;s an attempt to pretend that this doesn&#8217;t exist, but it absolutely exists in online spaces. Pretending it doesn&#8217;t is bulls*** and everyone knows it. I know it because I&#8217;ve had to have the FBI arrest somebody who was doing this while threatening not just me, by the way, but Donald Trump Jr. 
That ideology says that white people are being put upon in the United States by an entire system. And if you&#8217;re an advocate for that system, you are threatening me with destruction, with erasure, with white genocide, and thus you must be killed. Violence is a proper response to an attempted genocide. That is the argument that is made, at root, by many white supremacists. 
I&#8217;m not talking about what the Left calls white supremacy, which is anything to the right of Hillary Clinton. I&#8217;m talking about actual, honest-to-God white supremacists. I get an awful lot of death threats from them.
Group number three, radical Muslims, who believe that the failures of the Palestinians, for example, are the result of evil Western systems. And thus, if you are an advocate for those systems, it&#8217;s because you want to erase the radical Muslims and you want to kill people and you want to commit genocide, and therefore it is fine to shoot two Israeli embassy staffers dead in Washington, D.C. That is why it is fine to throw a Molotov cocktail at an 80-year-old woman in Colorado who was protesting Israeli hostages being held. 
We all know this is true. Pretending it isn&#8217;t true doesn&#8217;t make it go away. Not all movements are equally likely to bubble up with violence.
And so when we have politicians saying political violence is bad, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that use this logic, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that say that speech is in fact a form of violence, that systems are in fact a form of violence, and that violence is the proper response to that, then you are contributing to the environment in which this kind of stuff happens. 
It is not that there are many radical Muslims in the United States, by the numbers, thank God.
It’s not that there are many white supremacists in the United States.
But by the numbers, the increasing radicalism of the Left in the United States is, in fact, a massive issue. 
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently did rankings of campus free speech. And what they found is that college campuses are replete with the failure to speak your mind. 
Why? Because people are afraid of violence.
It goes all the way back to when I was in college. There&#8217;s nothing new here. I wrote my very first book, “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth,” in 2004 about the kind of discrimination conservatives faced on campus. And yes, there was the possibility of violence, even in 2004, not being shot, but the possibility of being physically assaulted, which is something that came close to happening to me multiple times, even when I was an undergrad. 
That&#8217;s going back 20 years, when I was warning that this was going to metastasize and take over huge swaths of the political Left. People ignored it at the time. But it was true.
I spoke in 2015 at the University of Missouri during the Black Lives Matter upsurge, after Ferguson. And I remember people asking about safety. I said, “I&#8217;m not worried about safety. There are some police there; I&#8217;ve got a security team now. No one’s going to take a shot at me. This is America. You don&#8217;t get shot in America for saying things on a college campus. This is America. I grew up in this country. This is my country. This is a country I love. This is where our fundamental value is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. No one&#8217;s going to do this kind of stuff. No one.” 
But it&#8217;s becoming more and more common. According to FIRE, a record 1-in-3 students now hold some level of acceptance, even if only rarely, for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. 
Now, I&#8217;m sure not everybody who believes they&#8217;re using violence thinks in terms of shooting someone to death. But when you are drawing from a pool at this point of legitimately tens of millions of young Americans, who are atomistic and isolated and don&#8217;t touch grass, it is not going to be hard to find some unhinged people who decide to take that to its logical conclusion and fire a bullet through the throat of a man who is simply attempting to speak truth to people in the friendliest possible fashion. 
I don&#8217;t like when people say “They shot Charlie,” because “they” isn&#8217;t a person. A person shot Charlie Kirk, and he shot Charlie Kirk for a deranged reason.
With that said, there are movements in which the substrate of their political thinking leads to an elevation in violence. Period. End of story. That is a reality.
And it is not enough to just say “political violence is bad” if you are not calling out the movements themselves.

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Saying ‘Political Violence Is Wrong’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough

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There are various types of what I call “scavengers.”
There are “leeches,” people who seek to tear down the institutions of free markets because they believe that they are entitled to the gains of others.
There are the “lechers,” people who believe that the traditional family, the church, have to be torn asunder because those things are an imposition from the outside.
And then there are the “barbarians.”
The barbarians are people who emanate from places outside the United States, outside the West. And they see themselves as representatives of civilizations that have been laid low by the West. They believe that all of their failures are the fault of Western civilizations.
As I write in my new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers</a>”:
<blockquote>The barbarian is an outsider to Western civilization who believes that all of his own maladies and ills can be laid at the feet of the colonizers of the West. In fact, the barbarian argues, only violence against his purported victimizers can free him of the servile mentality that these very colonizers have instilled in him. The barbarian speaks in the language of mass-murdering communist monster Che Guevara —whose visage still graces the T-shirts of thousands of misbegotten American college students — championing the power of hatred: “Hatred is an element of struggle, unbending hatred for the enemy which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.</blockquote>
The barbarians never posit a moral justification for how the destruction of the Western order ought to operate at their hands. They never explain just how, for example, a Palestinian state is somehow a burgeoning wellspring of human rights, or how an America without American values would make the world a better place. The only thing that matters is the destruction of the West, for in that destruction lies the supposed reclamation of the barbarian identity.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2271-the-ben-shapiro-show?elementPosition=3&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Last Friday, there was a big gathering of barbarians over in Detroit, Michigan, called the People&#8217;s Conference for Palestine. It was attended by a sitting member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib along with a wide variety of people who talked about the evils of America. They talked about how the country they were sitting in, this place that has given them prosperity, that has given them freedom, was an awful place. All of its core values are evil and terrible and need to be destroyed because America is a bad place, and Western civilization is responsible for all the ills of the rest of the world.
If you&#8217;re wondering why there are so many people in the West right are now moving toward right-wing parties, it is because those right-wing parties are saying, “We don&#8217;t need more of these people in our civilization.”
We don&#8217;t.
One speaker quoted someone saying that “the average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person, because the State of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States, and therefore the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in American&#8217;s heads so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside of the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things. We have to dismantle this idea of American exceptionalism, of supremacy, of being beyond reproach.”
He continued, “We live in an evil country.”
So get out. You can leave any time now.
Remember, the people who are being defended here by this person are the terrorist group Hamas.
There was not a single speaker at this event who said that Hamas should surrender, go into exile, and disarm, thus ending the war in Gaza and simultaneously ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
That was never mentioned by any of these people, because, of course, the fault always lies with America. It lies with the West. It lies with Israel. Anyone successful in the world is supposed to be a repository of exploitation.
Another speaker intoned, “We wanted to globalize the intifada, to expose to the world that Israel&#8217;s policies have nothing to do with security, that Israel tries to tell the world, and that our governments also regurgitate gaslighting us. We thought that if we could get this message out, the world would wake up and not allow Israel to do this, to do what it&#8217;s doing. And I must admit, that was a bit of naiveté on our part. But we have and we will continue to globalize the intifada, and we will force our government to listen to us, because they want us to accept a world that is inacceptable.”
“Inacceptable?” You mean unacceptable.
In any case, putting aside the grammar, the bigger problem here is the fact that “globalize the intifada” is a phrase that calls for widespread violence. That is what an intifada is, a violent uprising. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you.
<div id="attachment_967927" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-967927" class="wp-image-967927 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1024x576.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>DailyWire+</div>
This is happening on the soil of America, as I write about in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers</a>.” It&#8217;s not just that barbarians come from abroad and they enter our gates because we are soft-headed and soft-hearted. It&#8217;s also the enormous number of Americans who then side with the barbarians, because they don&#8217;t have confidence in their own civilization. They don&#8217;t have the belief in their own ideas to actually stand up to this garbage.
Lions are reflexively self-critical. What I mean by that is that in the West, there is actual moral merit to admitting your mistakes, to exposing yourself to the shame and ridicule of acknowledging guilt. That is something that good people tend to do.
Lions tend to do that because, after all, we live in a civilization, a Judeo-Christian biblically-based civilization, in which repentance is part of life. You&#8217;re supposed to acknowledge your sins so you can get stronger and get better.
The problem is that the barbarians and their allies are not interested in your proclamations of guilt. They&#8217;re not interested except to use it as a way to destroy you. They are interested in you shaming yourself. They want you to shame yourself and kneel before them so they can claim dominance. That&#8217;s the entire goal.
The co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide, last seen being ushered out of Congress after yelling at Marco Rubio during his confirmation hearings, called for the “taking out” of anyone who opposes his pro-terrorism agenda, saying they “need to be neutralized.”
This was in Detroit. Not in Qatar, or Iran.
This culminated with Rashida Tlaib, a sitting congresswoman from Michigan, ripping America and saying, “We are in your Congress.”
We know. We understand that the barbarian mentality is quite prevalent in our Congress.
“They thought they could kill us, rape us, and imprison us, violently, uproot us from our olive tree farms, starve our children to death, and we would disappear. Well, guess what? Now we&#8217;re in Congress and we&#8217;re in every corner of the United States,” she threatened. “We are just getting started.”
Yes, we understand that you have infiltrated Congress. We understand that. We understand there is a wide variety of people who have decided to stand in solidarity with all of this.
What is going to tear down the West is not just a West not confronted by the scavengers, but a West that allows the scavengers in; that somehow believes it is an aspect of its own greatness to allow the supremacy of people who wish to destroy its civilization.
That is the danger that lies within.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib Speaks To Press On Gaza Food Shortages

The Hate-America Barbarians Inside The Gates

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While the vast majority of Americans who dwell outside the ivory tower may roll their eyes at the crazed, fanatical politics that have festered at many college campuses across the country, this extremism hits much closer to home for level-headed college students and faculty. Recently, the Trump Administration has been using its control over federal education grants to push back against campus radicalism at some of America’s most elite universities.
Yet still untouched is the massive power that the Obama and Biden Administrations granted to campus union bosses who are frequently at the center of the most extreme and sometimes even violent so-called “activism” taking place at universities. It is time that Trump appointees go to work to fix it.
You see, currently, union bosses on dozens of campuses across the country are exercising government-granted powers that require unwilling graduate students to associate with (and often subsidize) campus unions. College administrators are also forced to “negotiate” with these union officials over campus policies, including discipline for violent campus agitators.
Those unfamiliar with labor law might wonder how union officials obtained such clout on college campuses in the first place – aren’t graduate students students, and not workers on a production line?
It all traces back to controversial rulings by the Obama and Biden National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which handed union bosses the power to obtain monopoly “representation” power over graduate and doctoral students. In states that lack Right to Work protections, that power includes forcing students to pay union dues.
This means union bosses can upend graduate students’ academic careers if they refuse to fund a group whose ideology they find abhorrent, which threatens both academic freedom and religious freedom on campus.
<div id="attachment_967075" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-967075" class="size-large wp-image-967075" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-864x576.jpg" alt="ITHACA, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 3: People walk through the Cornell University campus on November 3, 2023 in Ithaca, New York. The university canceled classes after one of its students is accused of making violent antisemitic threats. (Photo by Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images</div>
Take the case of David Rubinstein, a Ph.D. student in history at Cornell University whose research concerns the postwar Jewish diaspora in Europe. David, who is Jewish, wants as little as possible to do with the Cornell Graduate Student Union (CGSU-UE, an affiliate of the United Electrical union), knowing union officials’ virulent opposition to Israel and affinity for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
But when David exercised his right under federal law and demanded an accommodation to union dues payment based on his religious beliefs, union officials refused. They harassed Rubinstein and other religious objectors with unnecessary and illegal “questionnaires” that demanded they divulge particulars about their religious practice, their faith organizations, and faith leaders. As a result, with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, David is pursuing a federal civil rights case challenging CGSU-UE’s illegal tactics.
Numerous graduate students at other campuses have similarly needed to take legal action just to get campus union bosses to respect their legal rights. Yet graduate students shouldn’t need to jump through union-created hoops and tangle with union lawyers just to pursue a graduate degree in the first place.
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Fortunately, a more comprehensive solution is on the horizon. Russell Burgett, another Ph.D. student from Cornell, recently launched a groundbreaking NLRB case to strike at the heart of union bosses’ monopoly bargaining powers on campuses. A victory for him would free any dissenting graduate student – whether their opposition is political, religious, financial, or otherwise – from having their academic fates dictated by union apparatchiks.
His Foundation-backed case argues that Obama and Biden NLRB appointees were wrong to “reinterpret” federal law to allow union officials to collectivize graduate students. Nothing in the statute’s plain text suggests that students, whose primary reason for being on campus is to pursue a degree, should be included in the National Labor Relations Act’s definition of “employees.”
If he wins, militant campus union bosses would be stripped of their government-granted powers that let them dragoon unwilling students into their ranks, while also freeing administrators of their current obligation to “negotiate” with union boss radicals over the conditions of all graduate students.
President Trump is currently staffing up his NLRB. He should ensure his appointees get to work quickly on ending the monopoly “representation” and forced-dues powers that previous administrations improperly handed to campus extremists.
* * *
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Cornell University, College Town, Ithaca, NY, stone entrance sign with red Geraniums

For Grad Students, Labor Day Needs To Be Liberation Day From Radical Campus Union Bosses

American Universities

Boycott Divest Sanction

Labor Unions

Obama Administration

President Trump

Unions

On Tuesday, Australia announced it would expel Iran’s ambassador and suspend operations at Australia’s embassy in Tehran, accusing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of directing two antisemitic attacks, including the firebombing of a synagogue.
“Enough credible intelligence has now been gathered to reach the deeply disturbing conclusion that the Iranian Government has directed at least two of these attacks,” the Australian Foreign Minister’s Office <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/media-release/response-iranian-attacks">stated</a>. “Iran has sought to disguise its involvement but ASIO assesses it was behind the attacks on: Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney on October 20 last year; and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 6 last year.”
“We have informed the Iranian ambassador to Australia he and three additional Iranian diplomats will be expelled,” the statement continued. “We have suspended operations at our embassy in Tehran and all our diplomats are now safe in a third country. The Government will legislate so we can list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the IRGC &#8211; as a terrorist organisation.”
“Western security officials have said Tehran is increasingly turning to criminal networks in the West to target dissidents, critics and Jews. In another recent episode about two months ago, an alleged spy was arrested in Europe and German authorities said that Iran was suspected of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/iran-suspected-of-scouting-jewish-targets-in-europe-c92367c4?mod=article_inline">collecting information on Jewish targets</a> in Berlin to prepare for possible attacks,” The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/australia-blames-iran-for-antisemitic-attacks-expels-ambassador-bd63cfe6?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAgVTHU-bqkEarVLh3rjMjgp_QGnZrWNhB3D6pX8WHh89JAFMQ6sGxzikxFiEYg%3D&amp;gaa_ts=68ae2537&amp;gaa_sig=JHopOhKaIQX0YV1PohFfgPwH0WR76TCHcZBZ4IoxWtt5LlS7c-4KgSs56yO-5lL9i2dJP6vEhlAVNfNbm8JO8g%3D%3D">reported</a>.
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“For decades, the Iranian regime has posed a threat to Israelis and Jewish communities around the world,” the Israeli embassy in Australia wrote on X. “Today, it became clear that this threat has reached Australian soil.  The international community can no longer be complacent. Australia has taken a principled stand, others should consider following suit.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
For decades, the Iranian regime has posed a threat to Israelis and Jewish communities around the world.
Today, it became clear that this threat has reached Australian soil.
The international community can no longer be complacent. Australia has taken a principled stand, others… <a href="https://t.co/WOBBF2p5u5">https://t.co/WOBBF2p5u5</a>
— Israel in Australia (@IsraelinOZ) <a href="https://twitter.com/IsraelinOZ/status/1960206082456047974?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 26, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Although the current Australian government seems to be intent on protecting local Jews, it is far less interested in protecting Jews in the state of Israel. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has presided over an era in which antisemitism has become pronounced in his country and anti-Israel actions have grown ever more public, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/australia-palestinian-state-albanese-3d32a2d823a430cb85d3f6a83158dd90">said</a> in early August that his country would recognize a Palestinian state.
Australian television presenter Erin Molan, a staunch defender of the West and Israel, denounced the Australian government for asserting they would recognize a Palestinian state in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of over 1,200 Israelis, bitterly offering congratulations to Hamas and other terrorist groups.
“A big congratulations to Hamas off the news out of Australia that our government, our Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister will be recognizing a Palestinian state,” Molan said acidly. “They are, of course, in control of Gaza. They are terrorists and they carried out October 7. So a big congratulations to them for this wonderful shot in the arm.”
“I’d like to pass on my condolences to the hostages, around 50, who are still trapped in tunnels, are desperate, dying, suffering immensely; to every child in Gaza, my condolences to you as well because this will only prolong your pain because our government has just given a massive big hurrah to the people responsible for your pain: Hamas, the terrorists,” she declared.
“And also a big shout-out to every other heinous, murderous terrorist group in the world who was looking for a kind of way to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Western world,” she said. “Who now know all they have to do is break into another country, slaughter, rape, chop off heads, hack them off on camera, burn children alive, and take hostages, including babies, then kill them, and ‘Bob’s your uncle’: there you go: statehood.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
A huge congratulations not JUST to H*mas… but to terrorists everywhere 💪 What a win… 🥳
Ohhhh and condolences to the hostages, kids in Gaza and innocents everywhere who will suffer even more so as a result 🙏
Australia has just announced it will recognise a Palestinian… <a href="https://t.co/MF7OF2eAfQ">pic.twitter.com/MF7OF2eAfQ</a>
— Erin Molan (@Erin_Molan) <a href="https://twitter.com/Erin_Molan/status/1954753839061746149?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2025</a></blockquote>
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AUSTRALIA-RELIGION-POLITICS-FIRE-POLICE

Australia Expels Iranian Ambassador, Accuses Regime Of Orchestrating Antisemitic Attacks

Australia

Global Politics

Iran

IRGC

terrorist

World

Antisemitism is nothing new. It is an ancient evil, spanning from Haman to Hitler, and now manifesting in Hamas and Hezbollah. This is not just political ideology or a disturbing cultural trend, antisemitism is the primary objective from Hell.
After the Holocaust, the world promised, “Never again.” Yet here we are. The October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, surge in antisemitic rhetoric, violence targeting Jews and supporters of Israel all reveal an alarming truth: today’s complacency is tomorrow’s captivity.
When antisemitism rises, it doesn&#8217;t stop with the Jewish people. Hatred comes first for the Jews, then for everyone else. In denying the image of God in the Jewish people, antisemitism assaults the Judeo-Chrstian values that undergird peace and prosperity everywhere. That’s why Christians must stand up — against antisemitism and with Israel — now. We need to build a firewall against antisemitism or today’s generation will continue to spiral into moral confusion and spiritual blindness. 
Antisemitism is not just about politics. It’s about truth and the foundation of human flourishing. From Genesis to Revelation, there is no ambiguity whatsoever that there is a Divine purpose for the Jewish people. God’s Covenant with the Jews has not been nullified. Even in the New Covenant through Christ, there is a plan for the Jewish people in Israel.
That’s why I push back against replacement theology, the lie that the Church has replaced Israel in God’s divine plan. The apostle Paul makes the truth clear in Romans: God’s promises to the Jewish people still stand. The Church ought to reject replacement theology and, instead, embrace its calling to bless and stand with Israel.
The tide of antisemitism rises with violence and spiritual crises in our communities. It is a diabolical — truly demonic — attempt to erase the image of God from the Jewish people, undermining morality and humanity everywhere. We must be spiritually vigilant. This means prayer, public engagement and prophetic activism.
Christians must raise their voices. Pray to God, but also call upon your pastors, church communities and elected officials. Call out cowardice disguised as political neutrality. Confront the lies propagated online. Of the 100,000 evangelical churches in America, how many pastors spoke up after October 7? How many feared losing followers or political favor? Silence in the face of evil is complicity, and I call on all Christians to rise up and stand in support of Israel.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) is one ministry leading the way. For years, the IFCJ has united Christians and Jews through shared values and compassion, providing aid for Holocaust survivors, helping persecuted Jews immigrate to Israel and strengthening the holy bonds among Christians and Jews.
After October 7, the IFCJ launched the Flags of Fellowship project. The unifying initiative raises Israeli flags alongside Christian banners in churches across America. The public declaration is simple and critical: we will not be silent and we will not stand idly by.
I’ve met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Arab Christians and both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Israel. The tiny Jewish state is home to the freest Arabs and Christians in the region. It is the only nation in the region where minority communities — Christians, Muslims, Druze and others — can participate fully in society and serve in the government. Israel is not the villain of the Middle East. The portrayal of Israel as an oppressor is not just wrong; it’s a calculated, diabolical lie. Don’t swallow the lie. Speak up for the truth.
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Every believer can take action. We must. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Speak truth when lies spread. Contact your representatives in Congress. Preach truth from the pulpit, post it on social media and proclaim it in your daily life.
As believers, we are engaged in spiritual warfare, but we have the truth and we must practice prayerful vigilance. Remember Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation.” God calls us to thwart evil in all its forms, including that of antisemitism.
We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past and let evil persist. We need to engage in bearing witness, in reaching out to the Jewish community. We must not echo the complacency that destroyed Germany in the late 1930’s and led to the systematic murder of millions of people.
When hatred rises again — which it will — let us use our voices to conquer it. Silence is not an option. Silence is antithetical to the Christian faith. Locking arms with the Jewish people, let us stand together, defend truth and proclaim God’s love. For such a time as this, we are called to stand together and speak up.
* * *
Pastor Samuel Rodriguez is the lead pastor of New Season, one of America&#8217;s most influential megachurches, and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which represents millions of Christians worldwide. Rodriguez has advised three U.S. Presidents and is the first Latino to participate in multiple presidential inauguration ceremonies. He is also a best-selling author of 12 books and serves as producer of 7 faith-based films including &#8220;Breakthrough,&#8221; &#8220;Flamin&#8217; Hot,&#8221; and &#8220;Dream King.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Side by side spires with cross and star of david

Silence Is Not An Option: Why Christians Must Stand Against Antisemitism

Bible

How is it possible that Jews in New York could support a mayoral candidate that labels Israel genocidal and calls for the “intifada to be globalized?”
The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-jewish-voters-gaza.html">New York Times</a> would have us believe that there are many such Jews. I have trouble believing anything the NYT prints on this subject given the overwhelming evidence that they lie, distort and manipulate when it comes to Jews and Israel, as proven by their recent story about starving children in Gaza based on an altered photo, and their infamous lie about a bombed hospital in October 2023. So, it’s no surprise that in their Mamdani story, two of the five Jews interviewed work for the Mamdani campaign.
Even without such distortion, however, it is true that some Jews voted for Mamdani in the Democrat primary, and will vote for him again in the general election. 
I am an Orthodox Jewish film director, author and influencer, which is to say, a visible Jew both on the street and online. So, I’ve been getting asked, “What’s the story with your fellow Jews? How could they vote for a man who hates Israel and hates the Jews?”
To understand this, you first need to know something about Jews, namely, that we’re all different. We’ve been around for so long, and lived in so many countries, and fallen into so many different categories, that there is no such thing as a typical Jew.
Non-Jews, whether they love us or hate us, tend to lump us all together. They’re not entirely wrong because we’re not primarily a religion or a nationality – we’re a family. Now, every family contains different types of and categories of people, but the family remains distinct because relatives resemble each other physically, intellectually, temperamentally and spiritually.
Jews are not only a family, but we are also uniquely bound to God through the Torah and its system of commandments, as well as our shared destiny and connection to the Holy Land of Israel. The question is, why would a Jew who inherits our unbroken wisdom tradition stretching back 3,700 years turn his back on it?
Some chafe at the demands of the commandments. Others simply think they have a better idea, be it a credo they dreamed up or an “ism” to which they subscribed. And some turn their backs on our family to fit in at work, school, cocktail parties or online.
In seeking to curry favor with the Jew-hating mob, these Jews do enormous harm.
They often open their statements about Israel with, “As a Jew…” and then they parrot lies about Israel fabricated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, an entity created by Hamas to serve as the media arm of their terrorist organization. One glance at a fact-based website like StandWithUs.com, or even at a simple map of the region renders the bulk of these lies comically inept. After all, how can one Jewish state among 56 Muslim countries – most of which were not Muslim before the sword brought Islam to their lands – be labeled the “colonizer?”
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Statistically, Jews are well-educated, high-achieving and score above average on IQ tests. Why then do some Jews fall for these obvious fabrications? One reason is that siding with Jew-haters against Israel makes them feel virtuous, and we must never underestimate the power of feeling virtuous. That feeling is so addictive that they indulge in it even at the cost of lives: when the As-a-Jews speak out against Israel and get quoted by the enemies of Israel, they strengthen the hearts of Hamas terrorists.
Senior Hamas official <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/08/03/palestinian-state-is-one-of-the-fruits-of-october-7-emboldened-hamas-credits-its-violence-for-gains-as-released-hostage-video-spurs-outcry/">Ghazi Hamad</a> said on Al Jazeera that the recent push by multiple nations to recognize Palestine as a state is the fruit of October 7. In other words, their plan is working. Why would any government reward a terrorist state for the murder and rape of Israeli civilians? Because Hamas claims, “Israel commits genocide, and even the Jews admit it.” And as long as that plan is working, Hamas will keep firing rockets from their children’s bedrooms so they can shriek with victim-glee when Israel inevitably counter strikes. This is how the Hamas death cult operates. This is the modern version of that ancient evil, child sacrifice.
And the murderous phase of the present cycle is lasting longer than it would otherwise because those As-a-Jews give cover to our enemies. Their virtue-signaling costs lives.
Now let us recall that despite our family resemblances, Jews are all different. Most Jews are not As-a-Jews.
In my <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/">Orthodox community</a>, Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, even when they disagree with its government, and we also oppose communism, socialism, and any &#8220;ism&#8221; that privileges people based on their genes rather than merit. In this time of elevated danger to the Jewish people, we’re also profoundly grateful to live in a country that rejects antisemitism like every other racism, and to have allies who can see through Hamas/Iran lies about Israel. Increasingly, we’re also exercising our Second Amendment right to bear arms – with care and training – to protect our families. God forbid the Jew haters who daily chant violence against us come to kill us, we will not be a soft target.
The percentage of Jews who subscribe to these societal views drops significantly when we look at Jews in non-Orthodox denominations, collectively known as liberal Judaism. This term should not be confused with liberal politics, because there are many religiously liberal Jews who are politically conservative. It’s true that religiously liberal Jews do tend to be politically liberal but even so, they are not Mamdani Jews. If they’re affiliated with a synagogue, they tend to support Israel and feel a visceral connection to the Jewish people.
Mamdani Jews are usually those who’ve untethered themselves from Torah entirely. Either they’ve never been exposed to Judaism, or they’re actively against it. They’ll give many reasons why, but their disconnection allows them to generate their own system of morality, and to fit in with the Jew-haters who lionize them. At least for a while. Historically, such Jews get attacked in the end just like the rest of their family.
The Jew-haters offer new and different reasons for their hatred in every generation: we’re too stand-offish or we’re too assimilated, we’re too rich or we’re too poor, we’re stateless or we have a Jewish state. Perhaps the simplest reason is that we’ve lived in exile for so long, that we’ve learned how to arrive on a new shore, identify what success looks like in that culture, and attain it in one generation, even while retaining our ancient traditions and transmitting them to our children. Invariably, we succeed by contributing to the nation that hosts us.
The Mamdani Jews go awry because they jettison the guard rails of Torah and tradition while retaining otherwise positive Jewish qualities like studiousness, generosity of heart, and sympathy for the underdog. Without the Torah’s holistic system for living, these lovely traits can cause an individual’s moral system to skid off the rails and cause great harm.
This process is summed up by an old adage: one who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. In this case, Mamdani Jews support the Hamas death cult because they’re moved by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-hamas-photo-propaganda-dupes-the-west-and-fuels-bds?author=Alyssa+Rosenheck&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=72&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=How+Hamas+Photo+Propaganda+Dupes+The+West+And+Fuels+BDS">pictures</a> of sickly children, and they shut their eyes to the evidence that the sickly child’s well-fed siblings have been cropped out by cynical terrorists and their willing accomplices in the media. The result is more innocent lives lost, not less.
We try desperately to open the eyes of our brethren to these facts, yet they remain clenched shut.
Perhaps they keep their eyes shut because if they were to absorb these facts, they would have to open their eyes to many more. They’d have to make an accounting of their choices in a life untethered from Torah and Jewish tradition – a fearless moral inventory – and such a process is not for the faint of heart.
I pray these Mamdani Jews will remember who they are, and the family they come from, before our enemies force them to remember with a globalized intifada. In the meantime, I hope the rest of the family will join our allies and vote against <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/zohran-mamdani-and-the-jews-14af43f4?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAiXzeTg6rT_DtLVtkWHw22Y7q0ybjI7ZcoEh0OYYjwlT5NyVSaIVojQJVPeQu0%3D&amp;gaa_ts=689cb022&amp;gaa_sig=lT5KNgm62Sfsp4Z8hzGOleVUIcosspzZlBFzbQN9sOr_1OBrZLQwnJiF8THoYFxy3dKjy7fyQE7t-62e3mVs5g%3D%3D">Mamdani</a> because he is an enemy of the Jews, meritocracy, Israel, and America.
* * *
Salvador Litvak is the director of &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnkqomKfd90">Guns &amp; Moses</a>,&#8221; coming back to theaters across America <a href="https://www.fathomentertainment.com/releases/guns-moses/">Sept. 7-11</a>, and the author of his bestselling book, &#8220;Let My People Laugh: Greatest Jewish Jokes of All Time!&#8221; Learn more at <a href="http://salvadorlitvak.com/">salvadorlitvak.com</a>
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Holds News Conference

Why Would A Jew Vote For Mamdani?

Intifada

Mayor

New York City

Zohran Mamdani

Woke ideas, by definition, are fundamentally flawed. These include policies that can either be written off as unworkable — think high taxes, free health care, and open borders — or ridiculous impulses like gender confusion, environmental extremism, defunding the police, and critical race theory.
Over the past two years, the woke left has increasingly taken up a particularly alarming cause — antisemitism. Disturbingly, one of the most vocal proponents of this toxic ideology is perhaps the one best positioned to disseminate it where it does the most damage — in our children’s ears.
With astonishing regularity, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), finds itself embroiled in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAio3c5Mt0_L59ZPcvOPJickL051h1PbFLp_tScFw0mRoqrmcVgMIOsA6nnyibM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=688aa84c&amp;gaa_sig=LzMqnMYY5GorvJeQbZTzYtBBy9PjR6F0UEtTrKy5NvNssT-_RRcxOWjxtSm_an-HMy0mXn6s6GiAbh0Hv5M_hQ%3D%3D">controversy</a> around its attitude towards Jews and the conflict in Israel.
In late July, the leaders of the 3-million-member union were forced to walk back a <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/gaza-war-adl-teachers-union-nea-vote">decision</a> made earlier in the month when its 7,000-member Representative Assembly voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that has fought antisemitism and other forms of intolerance for over a century.
The body approved a measure stating that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.”
It reasoned: “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
The hypocrisy is palpable.
A week after its July 6th gathering in Portland, Oregon, members of the union’s Jewish Affairs Caucus penned a <a href="https://www.neajacaucus.org/post/letter-to-nea-leadership">letter</a> to NEA President Becky Pringle, noting that individual Jewish delegates to the event were “vocally mocked, harassed, and threatened in ways that dishonor our union.”
The letter continued, “Most unfortunate of all was how the NEA’s official statement framed the situation, as if U.S. classrooms were an extension of the battleground in Gaza … Presenting human dignity as a zero-sum game is perilous for all minorities. History teaches us that when one minority is deprived of its humanity without comment, others will be, too.”
“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” countered NEA delegate <a href="https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/07/educators-union-rejects-anti-defamation-league-cuts-ties">Stephen Siegel</a> from the assembly floor.
Publicly, Pringle acknowledged the Representative Assembly’s action went too far, <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-education/2025/07/21/nea-halts-bid-to-cut-ties-with-jewish-organization-00465130">stating</a>, “After consideration, it was determined that this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.”
Within days, however, the union’s true feelings came to light again when it announced plans to promote a version of Holocaust remembrance that does not even mention Jews, instead referencing, “…victims of the Holocaust from different faiths” and teaching that Israel was founded through “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.”
This wording comes directly from the priorities outlined in NEA’s <a href="https://www.nea.org/">2025 handbook</a>, which the union publishes each year as a guide on the group&#8217;s priorities and strategic goals for its national and state leaders, staff, and members. It includes the NEA&#8217;s bylaws and is updated with any new resolutions and policy positions the union has endorsed.
These aren’t isolated incidents. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAjStdmE5Sn12J-E4JPH8q2Os8fljrQpHJrtRWhjqSbFGcFj3jvZuqRKWEX9bFM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6890e11f&amp;gaa_sig=U7kbLb2MFLOViXFevR2KtAoLAxq3KPM9ZMb_XqIVIbO7hNpInieKcl1KH8QJS1WpqwlpKvfhq2REB_oFm2qzbQ%3D%3D">wrote</a> in the Wall Street Journal:
<blockquote>Local teachers’ unions in California have provided teachers with an anti-Israel script; in Minneapolis, they’ve labeled Israel as “apartheid.” In Chicago, the teachers’ union voted on anti-Israel resolutions and posted on social media that, “Zionists are not welcome.” In New York, the union representing City University of New York professors voted to divest from Israel. Others have gone so far as to prevent teachers from participating in mandatory antisemitism training. When the San Francisco Unified School District scheduled four such trainings for high school teachers, their union said they would support any educator who decided to skip the sessions.</blockquote>
Against this backdrop, Los Angeles District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, on July 21st, <a href="https://www.dailynews.com/2025/07/30/forced-representation-allows-haters-to-speak-on-behalf-of-their-victims/">dismissed a lawsuit</a> filed by seven Jewish teachers represented by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) — an affiliate of NEA — alleging the union had engaged in a pattern of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activity for years.
The Freedom Foundation, which is representing the teachers, plans to appeal Wilson’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sadly, it isn’t likely to be the last time the teachers&#8217; union’s politics of hatred are on display for a public that’s already had a bellyful of it.
* * *
Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

UTLA protest in Los Angeles, CA

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside The NEA’s Descent Into Antisemitism

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside NEA’s Antisemitism Problem

Education

National Education Association

Teachers Unions

Woke Culture

I still see his face every time I think of Washington Square Park: a stranger who was unapologetically pro-Hamas and made clear that he cheered the October 7 massacre in Israel.
As an Olympian on Israel’s bobsled team — a team with both Jewish and Arab athletes — I decided to engage with the public following the horrific events of October 7, 2023.
So, on October 15, 2023, I spent eight hours in a folding chair in New York City’s Washington Square Park. I placed a table in front of me with a sign that called Hamas a brutal terror organization and Israel a force for good. “Change my mind,&#8221; the sign read. Passersby questioned Israel’s right to defend itself, some even denied the brutality of Hamas. I spent the day dismantling every excuse for terror. I met them all with history, with personal testimonies, and with the same grit I bring to my Olympic training. Almost no one came by to actually defend Hamas, but most were almost exclusively anti-Israel.
<div id="attachment_958343" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958343" class="wp-image-958343 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-407x576.jpg" alt="Credit: AJ Edleman" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" />Credit: AJ Edleman</div>
<div id="attachment_958345" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958345" class="wp-image-958345 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-384x576.jpg" alt="Credit: AJ Edleman" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" />Credit: AJ Edleman</div>
But then, as the day was coming to a close, a man and his girlfriend approached the table. He was hot. Mad. Angry. He didn’t plead with a nuanced argument or context. He didn&#8217;t come to debate over Israel, he came to both defend Hamas and justify the attacks on October 7. It was deserved, you see. The natural reaction to Israel&#8217;s actions.
For over a decade, I have debated with all kinds of people on the topic of Israel. And there are some occasions when the feeling you are left with is far more powerful than the words the person used. I have hosted over a dozen events just like this one. And after debating hundreds of individuals, I can say that while I may forget the talking points, I can usually remember the overall feeling. This was just such an occasion. I could feel his hatred. This man hated who I was. What I was.
<div id="attachment_958347" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958347" class="size-large wp-image-958347" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-407x576.jpg" alt="Credit: David Zimand" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" />Credit: David Zimand</div>
It was only as his story at Columbia University broke into the news that a photographer-friend who had taken a picture of our encounter messaged me to ask if I realized who that was shouting at my face back in Washington Square Park: It was Mahmoud Khalil and his now-wife standing behind him as she nodded along with what he said.
And here’s what gets me: The media elevate voices like his because they somehow echo part of the cultural anger. We cut them slack, grant them platforms, then pat ourselves on the back for “honest debate.” But is shouting like a cheerleader for genocide really “honest”? Or is it moral abdication?
We treat his bloodlust as just another datapoint in a “heated discussion.” We ignore that he stands for rejoicing in the death of children. We gloss over the fact that someone who rationalizes cold-blooded massacre is someone we wouldn’t let babysit our own kids. Yet the legacy media puts them on a rhetorical pedestal and hands them the microphone.
Why do we give leeway to a man whose heart harbors hatred we’d recoil from in our personal lives? Because we in the West neutralize his crime into a “viewpoint” — and pretend there’s no difference between demanding justice and celebrating murder.
This is the hate-validation fallacy: assuming that any hatred we share is enough to legitimize the most extreme expressions of it. The media embrace the worst apologists for atrocity, then wonder why society feels more fractured than ever. Somehow, when it comes to Israel, this fallacy is dialed up to 11.
Are we so starved for certainty that we’ll champion the vilest among us just to prove we’re right? When did we decide that the loudest hate gets respect, while decency gets dismissed as propaganda?
Hamas stands for exulting in death — of Jews and their own people. There is no moral middle ground. And anyone who celebrates terror doesn’t have a “perspective” worth quoting — they’re a warning sign of how low discourse can sink.
That day in Washington Square Park, I saw his contempt up close. I saw how easily we can excuse the worst people when they confirm our biases. And I knew: if we don’t draw a line here, we lose more than a debate — we lose our humanity.
So, the next time you see a genocide apologist splashed across your feed, ask yourself: am I amplifying truth or validating hate? Because there’s a world of difference between making a point and aiding a monster.
We owe it to ourselves — and to every innocent life — to choose wisely. Reject the hate-validation fallacy. Refuse to give hate a stage. And remember: some voices deserve nothing but silence.
* * *
A.J. Edelman is an Israeli Olympian and captain of Israel’s Edelman Bobsled Team, a mixed Jewish/Druze team training for the 2026 Olympic Games, and in line to become Israel&#8217;s first ever multi-sport Olympian. When not sliding down mountains he is a writer and commentator.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Washington Square Park

The Day I Met Mahmoud Khalil In Washington Square Park

antisemitism

Hamas

Mahmoud Khalil

October 7

The University of Maryland has agreed to pay Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) $100,000 after the university first defended, but then briefly tried to reschedule, a rally on the anniversary of Hamas&#8217;s October 7, 2023 attacks by a campus group that advocates &#8220;the right of Palestinians to carry out armed struggle.&#8221;
The public university&#8217;s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter “will spend every dollar we receive from the $100,000 penalty for banning our vigil on organizing and supporting the movement for a free Palestine,” group member Daniela Colombi said in a <a href="https://www.cair.com/press_releases/palestine-legal-cair-announce-historic-100k-settlement-from-u-of-maryland-for-unlawfully-suppressing-pro-palestinian-student-speech/">statement</a>.
&#8220;Capitulating to bad faith, anti-Palestinian pressure will cost you,&#8221; Ahmad Kaki, a CAIR attorney, added, calling it a &#8220;transparent censorship attempt&#8221;—although even as CAIR fought for the right of students to demonstrate on October 7 on free speech grounds, it tried to force the university&#8217;s medical school to <a href="https://jewishinsider.com/2025/01/umd-medical-school-stands-by-israeli-surgeon-after-cair-played-role-canceling-his-talk/">cancel</a> a lecture by an Israeli surgeon.
CAIR noted that the Maryland public institution agreed to pay the anti-Israel group even as the Trump administration has extracted <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/columbia-university-retreats-as-trump-scores-historic-220m-settlement">massive</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ucla-will-pay-6-million-to-settle-antisemitic-discrimination-complaints">payments</a> from other universities for failing to protect Jews from antisemitism on campus. 
 University president Darryll Pines had in fact gone to great lengths to allow Students for Justice in Palestine to rally on the anniversary of the terror attack — an event advertised as &#8220;honor[ing] the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-maryland-will-let-anti-israel-group-hold-oct-7-rally">150,000+ martyrs</a> who have lost their lives within the past year&#8221; — including his personally echoing the false claim that Israel had killed 150,000 people, which not even Hamas contended.
But that freedom appeared to extend only to certain groups. In an email obtained by the Daily Wire, Pines threatened to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-of-maryland-prez-said-anti-israel-protesters-could-rally-on-10-7-then-threatened-to-call-police-on-jew-for-complaining">call the police on a Jewish woman</a> if she did not stop emailing faculty and staff with complaints about antisemitism.
When Jewish critics raised that double standard by wondering how Pines, who is black, would respond if it were a KKK rally instead of an anti-Israel rally, or confederate flags instead of Palestinian ones on the campus&#8217;s central quad, the rhetorical device seemed to go over Pines&#8217; head: he took it as a literal assertion that there was actually a KKK rally planned for October 7, and suddenly his prior First Amendment concerns no longer seemed to apply. 
Patricia Perillo, the University of Maryland’s Vice President of Student Affairs, later said in an affidavit that “on August 26, 2024, an individual emailed University President Darryll J. Pines, who is Black, advising that if the University was going to permit SJP’s event to go forward, ‘then my Klan Rally with sheets and a noose are also approved.’”
Pines cancelled all events on October 7, not because of his aversion to the anti-Israel event, but because of what he suggested was anti-black racism and threats by Jewish people, requiring the cancellation of events to protect the safety of the Palestine activists, according to prior Daily Wire reporting and CAIR&#8217;s summary of the lawsuit.
&#8220;The University <a href="https://palestinelegal.org/s/Defendants-Opposition-to-Plaintiffs-Motion-for-TRO-and-PI.pdf">responded to CAIR and Palestine Legal’s lawsuit</a> by claiming that it was forced to cancel all events due to racist threats from pro-Israel individuals, who had threatened to organize a KKK rally and come to campus armed if SJP’s vigil was allowed to proceed. At the hearing, University of Maryland Police Chief David Mitchell testified that pro-Israel individuals even threatened UMD President Darryl Pines’ family and used the N-word,&#8221; CAIR said in its statement heralding the settlement.
But the postponement of all October 7 gatherings on campus was short-lived. Despite Pines&#8217; general sympathy to the group, SJP sued his university in federal court, backed by lawyers from CAIR. On October 2, U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte wrote that the Palestinian group would suffer &#8220;irreparable harm&#8221; if it could not congregate on that date to mark &#8220;what it calls Israel&#8217;s most recent &#8216;genocidal campaign,'&#8221; and ordered the event <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/federal-judge-says-university-must-let-anti-israel-group-hold-oct-7-event">reinstated</a>.
In its statement on the settlement, CAIR cast the planned event as a &#8220;vigil&#8221; somberly mourning the deaths of people in the Israel-Hamas war, but that is not what contemporaneous documents indicate. SJP&#8217;s national headquarters had called for a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/this-student-group-is-calling-for-a-week-of-rage-beginning-october-7">&#8220;Week of Rage&#8221;</a> coinciding with the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group&#8217;s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis. 
An application for reserving campus space, filed August 1, contained only a nine-word description of the event (&#8220;One year since the genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza&#8221;), according to documents obtained under public records laws, and Jewish critics have raised questions about whether the group failed to properly comply with the university&#8217;s rules for getting events approved, which would have given Pines a mechanism for blocking the event. 
Pines dismissed complaints from Jews by claiming that the group had &#8220;condemned the horrific attack by Hamas,&#8221; but a Daily Wire review of SJP&#8217;s social media showed no such sentiment. SJP instead said on Instagram that it supports the “<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C_WntvnPe2D/?img_index=5">right of Palestinians to carry out armed struggle,</a>” and “unequivocally states that the Zionist state of Israel has <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C9yDEB3PJv6/?img_index=5">no right to exist</a>.” 
Pines was so invested in defending the anti-Israel group that he resorted to academic misconduct, sending a Jewish critic what he said was original &#8220;faculty research&#8221; from Middle East scholars on campus that proved that the Palestinian flag was not objectionable. The Daily Wire found that what he called the &#8220;consensus opinion from these faculty scholars,&#8221; whom he claimed he personally consulted with, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-maryland-president-plagiarized-from-chatgpt-to-justify-anti-israel-oct-7-rally">actually came from ChatGPT</a>.
That misrepresentation spurred The Daily Wire to check Pines&#8217; past academic work for plagiarism, and it found that nearly one-third of a 5,000-word paper was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-maryland-president-copied-rocket-science-paper-from-aussie-student">copied and pasted from an Australian student</a>, who was never referenced anywhere in the paper. There was evidence that Pines (or his co-author) had not accidentally mixed up someone else&#8217;s work with their own, because the British spellings in the Australian version had — with one exception that was missed — been changed to the American versions.
Pines acknowledged &#8220;recurrent language&#8221; but denied misconduct, and the state&#8217;s university system opened a review into his academic integrity. Ten months later, the review panel has <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;opi=89978449&amp;url=https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/higher-education/university-of-maryland-darryll-pines-plagiarism-AHZESFHKN5HA5DLTEF32CER46E/">issued no findings</a>.
The University of Maryland did not answer The Daily Wire&#8217;s questions, but said in a statement that &#8220;the litigation in federal court has been mutually resolved through a settlement agreement with no admission of liability by the University.&#8221;
&#8220;UMD SJP is a registered University student organization in good standing which has had more than 100 events on campus since October 7, 2023, for which it consistently followed the University’s policies and procedures governing such events,&#8221; it added. &#8220;The University reiterates its support for the First Amendment and particularly making campus space available for individuals and groups of all viewpoints to share their opinions pursuant to its Guidelines for Expressive Activities and the First Amendment. The University takes very seriously its responsibilities for the safety and security of all University students and other members of its community.&#8221;
A top senator this week <a href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-to-long-investigate-cair-for-ties-to-terrorists">called</a> for CAIR&#8217;s tax-exempt status to be examined due to its &#8220;ties to terrorists.&#8221;

UMD Students for Justice in Palestine / Instagram

University of Maryland Will Pay Anti-Israel Group That Planned Campus Rally On October 7

Free Speech

Maryland

Universities

University of Maryland

The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay more than $6 million to settle discrimination complaints that included a &#8220;Jew Exclusion Zone&#8221; on campus.
The school agreed to enter consent judgment and pay $6.13 million to the plaintiffs in the largest private settlement of its kind, the New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/07/29/us-news/ucla-to-pay-6m-to-settle-discrimination-complaints-including-campus-jew-exclusion-zone/">reported</a>. It will be in effect for 15 years if approved by a judge.
“Campus administrators across the country willingly bent the knee to antisemites during the encampments,” Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and an attorney for the students, said in a statement. “They are now on notice: treating Jews like second-class citizens is wrong, illegal, and very costly. UCLA should be commended for accepting judgment against that misbehavior and setting the precedent that allowing mistreatment of Jews violates the Constitution and civil rights laws. Students across the country are safer for it.”
The settlement includes damages to each of the plaintiffs, charitable contributions to pro-Jewish organizations, and attorneys&#8217; fees and costs. The university also agreed to a permanent court order preventing it from enabling the exclusion of Jewish students and faculty from campus, <a href="https://becketfund.org/media/breaking-ucla-agrees-to-permanent-court-order-stopping-campus-antisemitism-pays-6m-in-damages-and-fees/">according</a> to a press release from the Becket Fund.
Last year, a video <a href="https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1785030056617611457">showed</a> masked protestors wearing keffiyehs blocking a Jewish student from entering campus, even though he was an enrolled student.
&#8220;I’m a UCLA student, I deserve to go here, we pay tuition,&#8221; the student said as he tried to pass the students to reach his class building. &#8220;This is our school and they are not letting me walk in.&#8221;
&#8220;We&#8217;re not engaging with that behavior,&#8221; one protestor replied without moving.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said the behavior was &#8220;really inappropriate,&#8221; and students &#8220;could be&#8221; expelled for discriminating against any student because of race, religion, or ethnicity.
Students sued after Block and the Board of Regents admitted they had taken no action against the protestors who blocked the Jewish student.
Yitzchok Frankel, a recent UCLA Law graduate and one of the plaintiffs in the case, called UCLA&#8217;s actions &#8220;shameful.&#8221;
“When antisemites were terrorizing Jews and excluding them from campus, UCLA chose to protect the thugs and help keep Jews out,” Frankel said in a statement. “That was shameful, and it is sad that my own school defended those actions for more than a year. But today’s court judgment brings justice back to our campus and ensures Jews will be safe and be treated equally once again.”
UCLA&#8217;s settlement comes after Columbia University <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/columbia-university-retreats-as-trump-scores-historic-220m-settlement">agreed</a> to pay more than $200 million to settle with the Trump administration over its handling of anti-Israel protests. Harvard University is also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/harvard-open-to-paying-500m-settlement-amid-trump-crackdown-on-campus-antisemitism">considering</a> settling with the administration for $500 million over alleged civil rights violations.

1497993_me-ucla-pro-palestinian-protest_JEY

UCLA Will Pay $6 Million To Settle Antisemitic Discrimination Complaints

Courts

U.S.

UCLA

Federal funds earmarked for increasing “the security and prosperity of the United States” bankrolled the work of the father of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani that would seem to do the opposite.
Columbia University’s Middle East Institute applied for the Department of Education’s “National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships” money based on its employment of professors including Mahmood Mamdani, who it called senior faculty, highlighting his recent work on “colonialism” and “native as political identity,” and his “courses on Islam, state violence, and international relations.”
The <a href="https://iris.ed.gov/downloads/applications/P015A180080/P015A180080_GrantApplication.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">application</a> said that Columbia should get taxpayer money because its international professors would shape the views of Americans who would go on to work for the United States government. It &#8220;specifically trains students for employment in positions in the government (State, Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence agencies, and Congressional Offices),” it said.
The Middle East unit at the lavishly endowed private university asked for more than $1 million from taxpayers to fund the professors&#8217; salaries and other costs for four years under the National Resource Centers program, and $1.6 million for &#8220;institutional payments&#8221; and &#8220;subsistence allowance&#8221; for students under the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship. Between 2018 and 2024, Columbia University as a whole received nearly $12 million in grants from both programs, with nearly $4 million specifically for the Middle East program, according to data compiled by spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.
That means even as Columbia this week agreed to pay a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/columbia-university-retreats-as-trump-scores-historic-220m-settlement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$200 million settlement</a> to the federal government and $20 million to Jewish employees it wronged with its culture of anti-Americanism and antisemitism, the federal government has been paying it to shape federal employees and diplomats.
When it comes to the Karl Marx-quoting prospective mayor of New York, who would <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/given-three-chances-zohran-mamdani-wont-condemn-calls-to-globalize-the-intifada?author=Virginia+Kruta&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=Given+Three+Chances%2C+Zohran+Mamdani+Won’t+Condemn+Calls+To+‘Globalize+The+Intifada’">not condemn</a> the phrase “globalize the intifada,” the son’s views appear to have been shaped by his father. In May 2021, Professor Mamdani <a href="https://x.com/mm1124?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweeted</a>: “This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler-colonialism!”
Even though the United States took in the elder Mamdani after he was cast out of Uganda by a dictator and made him a wealthy university professor, Mamdani&#8217;s 2020 book, &#8220;Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,&#8221; criticizes America as oppressive, according to an interview with <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mahmood-mamdani-nation-state-interview/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Nation</a>. The book reaches back hundreds of years to complain of &#8220;the genocide of Native Americans by Europeans&#8221; and conversion of Muslims by Christians, and casts &#8220;the founding of the state of Israel&#8221; as an act &#8220;of extreme political violence undertaken to create ethnically homogeneous states.&#8221;
He seemed to suggest to The Nation that the cure for Hamas violence was giving in to terrorists.
&#8220;You can fill an unlimited number of jails [with] perpetrators, but it will not bring a solution to the problem unless you acknowledge that the problem is more political than criminal, and that when it comes to political conflicts and political violence, adversaries mobilize around issues,&#8221; Mamdani wrote.
In his 2004 book &#8220;Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,&#8221; he made a similar argument, writing: &#8220;Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.&#8221;
<div id="attachment_891841" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-891841" class="size-large wp-image-891841" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-864x576.jpg" alt="Columbia University Expels, Revokes Degrees From Students Who Seized Campus Building" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-2048x1366.jpg 2048w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-1800x1200.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2150306027-1200x800.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Columbia University. Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images</div>
The professor <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/07/12/us-news/mamdanis-dad-part-of-anti-israel-group-sympathetic-to-suicide-bombers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sits</a> on an advisory council whose goal is &#8220;to awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel&#8217;s genocide in Gaza&#8221; — a position that conflicts with that of the U.S. under Democrat and Republican administrations.
Columbia University also used Professor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/doe-program-meant-to-boost-national-security-funds-anti-american-professors-study-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Joseph Massad</a> as a selling point for federal money. Massad called Hamas’ October 7 attack “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” According to the Middle East Forum, students said Massad “takes a categorically anti-U.S. tack at every possible opportunity,” and lists “the West’s various cultural crimes ad nauseam.”
George Washington University, located near the State Department’s headquarters, received millions of dollars in Middle East Foreign Language and Area Studies funding from the Department of Education, even as a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/george-washington-university-antisemitism-lawsuit?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=12&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=U.S.+Diplomat+Training+Ground+Let+Antisemites+Take+Over+Its+Faculty%2C+Lawsuit+Says" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lawsuit</a> said it let an anti-Israel activist group operate out of its international affairs school, leading to rampant antisemitism on a campus where more than one in four students is Jewish.
Prosecutors said in 2019 that a Texas-born woman charged with spying for Iran had her radicalization “<a href="https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/18/iran-spy-george-washington-university-muslim/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accelerated while she was in graduate school</a>” at George Washington University, where she earned a master’s degree in its Middle East Studies program.
Also in 2019, the first Trump administration threatened the University of North Carolina and Duke University for their use of the funds, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-demands-unc-duke-revise-joint-middle/story?id=65754681" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writing</a> that &#8220;It seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken &#8216;a back seat&#8217; to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.&#8221; But little seems to have changed sector-wide.
<a href="https://www.openthebooks.com">OpenTheBooks</a> CEO John Hart said that the Department of Education’s persistent funneling of millions of dollars for professors who cultivate anti-American sentiment, using funds intended to do the opposite, shows that the National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies program, if not the department as a whole, should be abolished.
&#8220;Professor Mamdani&#8217;s embrace of faddish, faculty lounge DEI theories on &#8216;decolonialism&#8217; illustrates why the Department of Education needs to be eliminated or dramatically downsized,&#8221; Hart said. &#8220;I support Professor Mamdani&#8217;s free speech rights, and the rights of his son to call for &#8216;seizing the means of production,&#8217; but that does not mean either are entitled to advance their radical views with taxpayer subsidies.&#8221;

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Federal Money Meant For Training Diplomats Bankrolled Mamdani’s Father’s Anti-Americanism

Columbia University

Department of Education

New York

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