The report is the result of two task forces charged with looking into the perceptions and feelings of Jewish, Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian students.

“The differences in perceptions of comfort and safety are rather stark depending on one’s own identities,” the report states in its findings. “Members of all affected communities perceived less openness to diversity of opinions compared to members of the broader campus community and expressed greater perceptions of discomfort and unsafety for those who share their identities compared to those who do not.”

The report states that students reported both Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus, including anti-Israel bias and a “perceived alienation and lack of support for Palestinian and Muslim communities.” Insults, intimidation, and a desire to hide their identities were reported all around.

“The intent of this joint submission is not to equate antisemitism and Islamophobia, but to acknowledge that this particular moment puts into sharp relief the need to examine both in a shared context, as the present conflicts shine light on issues that impact members of our campus community who have experienced pain, isolation, fear, and discrimination,” the report states.

According to UW’s report, during the 2023-24 academic year:

• About two-thirds of Palestinian students said they had experienced insults and intimidation over the previous year. About half to one-third of Muslim and Arab/Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) students reported the same.
• One-third of Jewish students and 70% of Israeli students said they experienced insults and intimidation.
• 72% of Arab or MENA, 80% of Muslim students, and 78% of Palestinian students in the focus groups said they were unwelcome because of their identities.
• 60% of Jewish students and 92% of Israeli students in the focus groups said they were unwelcome because of their identities.
• 69% of Arab/MENA students, 74% of Muslim students, and 77% of Palestinian students reported a desire to hide their identity at least once (38% of Arab/MENA students, 40% of Muslim students, and 50% of Palestinian students said this happened frequently).
• 65% of Jewish students and 95% is Israeli students said they needed to hide their identities at least once (42% of Jewish students, 81% of Israeli students said this happened frequently).

Read the full 143-page report here.

In March 2024, UW President Ana Mari Cauce ordered the formation of the two task forces — one for gauging Islamophobia on campus, and the other for Anti-Semitism. Those task forces conducted a series of surveys with focus groups in May 2024 to develop the report released Tuesday. During that time, there were multiple protests and a pro-Palestine encampment on the UW campus.

“We recognize the importance of preserving public free speech; however, the encampment and campus protests, at times, were perceived to go beyond these lines of argument and advocacy to call, implicitly or even explicitly, for violence,” the report states.

“Many survey or focus group participants were distressed by the perceived alienation and lack of support provided for Palestinian and Muslim members of our community. In voicing concerns related to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, they sought visibility for their cause and for the UW to provide a place where these local and global concerns could be focused on, feeling at times that their message and concerns were not adequately heard nor addressed.”

No information from these focus groups was looked into or confirmed for accuracy. UW says that the purpose of the task forces was more for “gathering feedback and gaining an understanding of the campus climate.”

Source: KUOW 

A pro-Palestinian campus group at Northwestern University said the medical school scrubbed photos of Arab students, some of whom were wearing traditional headdresses, from several social media platforms.

In an Instagram post over the weekend, the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine said some of the photos taken at a school event earlier this year showed medical students wearing keffiyehs, a garment widely known to symbolize solidarity with the Palestinian people. They were deleted from Flickr, an online photo-sharing platform.

The group also said officials at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine removed photos of Arab students from its official Instagram page. In an open letter to school administrators, the club demanded a public apology and an investigation into the incident.
“After 10 months of viewing the live-streamed genocide of their people, Palestinian medical students and their families are not allowed to celebrate their achievements in public without being targeted by their own administration,” the group wrote online.

In a statement, university spokesperson Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the photos were deleted to safeguard students from doxing. The university did not immediately clarify whether the students had been doxed or endangered because of the photos. Officials made the decision, the spokesperson said, “out of an abiding concern for the safety and well-being of the students pictured.”
“Student safety is our highest priority at Feinberg and Northwestern,” Anyaso said. “We are proud of Feinberg’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

As college campuses became hotbeds for debate over the Israel-Hamas war, many Arab and Muslim students felt increasingly unsafe. Last November, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot in Burlington, Vermont, where they had gathered for a Thanksgiving celebration. One was paralyzed from the chest down. While it is unclear whether they were targeted for their ethnicities, the mother of one of the victims said she believed they had experienced a hate crime.

So-called “doxxing trucks” bearing the names and faces of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators circled campuses in the fall at several colleges. Some schools took action to protect those students, who were being accused of antisemitism.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said it recorded the highest number of discrimination complaints in its 30-year history in 2023. Roughly one in 10 of those complaints was connected to an educational program.

Source: USA Today

Months before the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war ramped up ethnic and religious tensions in many Canadian communities, a government task force rejected requests to recognize Muslim and Jewish public servants as separate groups facing systemic workplace barriers.

Muslim and Jewish public servants asked to be designated as employment equity groups under the Employment Equity Act nearly two years ago in submissions to the task force, set up by Employment and Social Development Canada.

“Discrimination and socio-economic barriers continue to exist for Canadian Muslims. These barriers will not disappear without intervention,” says the MFEN’s (Muslim Federal Employees Network) submission. “We recommend that Muslims are added to the Employment Equity Act as a designated employment equity group.”

The Employment Equity Act (EEA) was introduced in 1986 to knock down employment barriers facing four marginalized groups: women, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and members of visible minorities.

The legislation requires that federally regulated employers with more than 100 employees use data collection and proactive hiring to ensure that these groups are not under-represented in their workforces. No designated employment equity groups have been added to the EEA since its creation.

The Muslim Federal Employees Network (MFEN) and Jewish Public Service Network (JPSN) submissions were prepared in spring 2022, long before the latest deadly conflict erupted between Israel and Hamas in October of last year.

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan shared the task force’s findings with the media last December, after his office initially received them in April 2023.

The task force said it decided “not to recommend the creation of a separate category for some or all religious minorities at this time,” but encouraged further study.

The MFEN said Muslim federal employees face various forms of Islamophobia. In its submission, it cited reports of Muslim women being subjected to comments “about their ability to do their federal public jobs because they wear a hijab,” and of Muslim men “who are seen to be terrorists and perpetrators of violence.”

It said Muslim federal employees have sometimes struggled to obtain security clearances “because of biases around their countries of origin or their names.”

Final decisions on adding more groups to the legislation will be made by O’Regan.

In a statement, O’Regan’s office said it might consider further changes to the EEA.

The statement said O’Regan “will continue to engage affected communities, including religious minority communities.”

The office said it looks forward to tabling new government legislation but did not offer a timeline.

Source: CBC News

A former State Department employee charged with a hate crime in November after he harassed a halal food vendor in Manhattan, calling him a “terrorist,” may have his charges dismissed if he completes a 26-week anti-bias course and fulfills other requirements, according to prosecutors.

At a court appearance, Manhattan prosecutors said that if the man, Stuart Seldowitz, completed the program through the organization Queens Counseling for Change, had no new arrests and did not violate a protective order, they would ask that his charges be dropped. Mr. Seldowitz agreed, according to prosecutors.

However, Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, said in a statement on that “light punishments are a slap in the face to the victims.”

Video recordings of the encounters between Mr. Seldowitz and the vendor spread online as tensions intensified between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups after the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7. In New York, where demonstrations about the conflict have become a near daily occurrence, those tensions have been particularly high.

The number of hate crimes logged in the city during October was more than double that of the previous October. Last year through mid-December, the Manhattan district attorney’s office initiated 111 hate crime cases, compared with 92 in 2022 and 81 in 2021, according to a spokeswoman.

The charges against Mr. Seldowitz were brought after the vendor, whom the police identified as a 24-year-old man, told officers that he had been approached by another man who made Islamophobic statements several times while he was working on the Upper East Side, causing him to feel “afraid or annoyed.”

New Yorkers from across the city came together to support halal cart operator Mohammed Hussein after watching the hateful attacks by Seldowitz, with city councilwoman Julie Menin stressing that “hate and harassment have no place in our community.”In several videos, Mr. Seldowitz can be seen taking pictures of the vendor, berating him and telling him: “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.” Mr. Seldowitz also threatens to send pictures of the vendor to “friends in immigration.”

Mr. Seldowitz had a decades-long government career in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as acting director for the National Security Council’s South Asia Directorate and a post in the State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.

Source: The New York Times

According to developers, the app was removed because a sentence in the description read: “Welcome to No Thanks, here you can see if the product in your hand supports killing children in Palestine or not.”

On 3 December, Google reinstated the app to its Play Store with a new description reading: “Our app simplifies the process of scanning barcodes and searching for products that are listed for the boycott movement.”

Launched on 13 November, No Thanks was downloaded over 100,000 times before it was removed from Play store on 30 November.

According to No Thanks, the app was developed by Ahmed Bashbash, who lives in Hungary and describes himself as a Palestinian from Gaza. Bashbash stated that he lost his brother “in this massacre” – and his sister in 2020 because she was deprived of medical support. A version designed for Apple products has been developed and is currently under review.

Source: The Middle East Eye

In a press conference in Dearborn, Michigan, Muslim organizers from Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, and Pennsylvania came together to announce a coordinated nationwide effort to ensure Biden does not secure a second term in office.

“We are not powerless as American Muslims. We are powerful. We don’t only have the money, but we have the actual votes. And we will use that vote to save this nation from itself,” Jaylani Hussein, a member of the coalition, said at the press conference.

The campaign was initially being run separately in different states, but they now have decided to coordinate their efforts on a national level.

While it is unclear how much traction the campaign will get, organizers are confident that they can put together a significant bloc of Muslim voters as the population of American Muslims is roughly 3.45 million people and they are able to sway the election.

Source: The Middle East Eye

The European Commission has promised a €30m (£26m) fund to increase security at mosques and synagogues across the continent as it condemned a recent rise in levels of antisemitism and Islamophobia as “un-European”.

Saying that tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war had provoked hostility “reminiscent of the darkest days of Europe’s history”, the commission called on social media companies to do more to remove hateful content.

Announcing the new fund, which will mostly be used to step up security around public spaces, community centers and places of worship such as synagogues and mosques, Margaritis Schinas, the vice-president of the commission, said no European should tolerate fellow citizens feeling unsafe.

He said: “If you visit a mosque or a synagogue in any European city, most likely you will see that there is a security perimeter. And this is the most un-European state, this is not part of our Europe. Europe should not look like this.

“I will personally never accept that Europe is a place where any religious community feels unsafe. And nor should any European accept that,” he added, as he launched the Europe against Hate campaign alongside Vera Jourová, the commission vice-president for values and transparency.

The commissioners said there had been a “spectacular” rise in antisemitic incidents in Europe, with an 800% increase reported in the Netherlands. In France the number of incidents recorded between 7 October and 15 November was 1,518, compared with 436 for the whole of 2023.

There had also been a sharp rise in Islamophobia, which Jourová said was similar to a “spike of hatred” towards Muslim communities after the 2015 refugee crisis. Last month the French Muslim Council said it had received 42 letters containing threats or insults in October alone. Mosques had also been targeted, with 17 receiving threatening letters and 14 vandalized, it said.

Jourová said: “We have to combat anti-Muslim bigotry and all forms of hatred and racism.”

She demanded that social media companies face up to their obligations under the new Digital Services Act, which requires them, for the first time, to be the ones to enforce hate speech and counterterror legislation across the EU.

Jourová singled out Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok as companies that must do more to remove hate speech from their platforms.

She said: “Much has to be done in the case of X and in the case of TikTok because this is what the Jewish communities are telling me they are really worried about, about these two platforms, and especially TikTok, as a problem because they are having an enormous influence on [how] the young generation thinks.”

The commission said it would push for stronger rules to counter illegal hate speech online under a code of conduct signed with online platforms, to be finalized in the next three months, in addition to the stricter regulation for large online platforms that has been introduced earlier this year in the Digital Services Act.

It is also supporting training for journalists on upholding media standards and recognizing hate speech, while increasing support for factcheckers within the EU and the Arab-speaking world.

Source: The Guardian

Hollywood talent agency, United Talent Agency (UTA), has dropped Susan Sarandon after remarks she made at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York. And actress Melissa Barrera was fired from the cast of the upcoming thriller Scream VII, in which she was slated to reprise her leading role in the franchise after sharing pro-Palestinian statements on social media.

A UTA spokesperson, cited by several US media outlets, confirmed that Sarandon was dropped but not did not elaborate on the decision.

The Oscar-winning actress attended several pro-Palestinian rallies and faced criticism for saying at a Nov. 17 rally in New York City: “There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.”

She was among the Hollywood stars, including Joaquin Phoenix and Cate Blanchett, urging US President Joe Biden to demand a cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas.

During the rally, Sarandon also said criticizing Israel should not be considered antisemitic.

“There’s a terrible thing that’s happened where antisemitism has been confused with speaking up against Israel,” she said. “I am against antisemitism. I am against Islamophobia.”

Barrera, 33, was fired Tuesday from Scream VII by production company, Spyglass, according to a report in Variety.

The industry insider magazine cited company sources who said Barrera was removed due to her social media posts, including referring to Israel as a “colonized” land and for saying that Israel controls the media.

“I too come from a colonized country. Palestine will be free,” she wrote in an Instagram post which was viewed as “antisemitic.”

“Western media only shows the other (Israeli) side. Why do they do that, I will let you deduce for yourself,” she wrote in a separate Instagram story.

“Censorship is very real. Palestinians know this, they know the world has been trying to make them invisible for decades. Keep sharing,” she said.

Spyglass released a statement on Barrea’s removal and said its stance is “unequivocally clear.”

“We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” it said in a statement quoted by several US media outlets.

Source: Anadolu Agency