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Dean Sudha Setty’s applause for a valedictorian’s speech that incited hatred of Israel “is a profound failure of her duties,” say S.A.F.E. CUNY and the Jewish Leadership Project.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Two organizations are now calling for the removal of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law’s dean after she showed approval for the antisemitic contents of a valedictorian’s speech at commencement last month.

“We were the first, or among the first, to report that we believed the speech was seen by administrators and approved,” said Jeffrey Lax, Business Department chair at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College and founder of S.A.F.E. CUNY, a non-profit that advocates for Zionist Jews systemically discriminated against and excluded by the university and its union.

“We now believe that it was seen not only by admins at CUNY Law, but also across other CUNY units. We cannot say for sure that Dean Setty herself reviewed the document. but that is irrelevant to us, as she is seen on stage standing and applauding the speech after it was given,” he told World Israel News.

This was unacceptable behavior for the woman who took over as dean last February, said Lax, who previously noted that the school had wiped the livestreamed event from their website in order to hide it.

“Dean Setty’s enthusiastic applause to a speech that bordered on incitement to violence was a profound and vulgar failure of her duties both as a legal scholar and as the Dean of a law school,” he charged. “SAFE CUNY demands the immediate termination of Dean Setty from her role as dean of CUNY School of Law.”

Upon assuming her position, Dean Sudha Setty said that the “mission” of the school was “social justice lawyering and tackling the structural barriers to justice that exist in so many contexts.”

The valedictorian, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, had railed against “capitalism and racism, imperialism and Zionism,” and falsely claimed that Israel indiscriminately killed and tortured Palestinians.

It took over two weeks for CUNY’s chancellor and board of trustees to label the address as “hate speech” and to condemn it, but no further action was demanded. Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez also failed to appear via Zoom earlier this month at a meeting of the New York City council that discussed allegations of antisemitism throughout the city’s 25 campuses of higher public education.

CUNY’s law school faculty and student government has endorsed the BDS movement, although New York is one of dozens of states that have anti-BDS laws on their books.

When  video of Mohammed’s speech came out, Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) tweeted that he was “finalizing legislation to strip universities of their funding if they engage in and promote antisemitism.”

“CUNY should be ashamed of itself – and should lose any federal funds it currently receives,” Lawler wrote.

The Lawfare Project, which represents victims of discrimination and terrorism in court, has applied to the Committee on Character and Fitness at the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division demanding that Mohammed be blocked from becoming a lawyer due to her hate- and lie-filled rant against Israel.

Noting that it was not the first time she had expressed such views, the Project’s COO and director of research Ben Ryberg tweeted, “It’s our belief that a person who has proved themselves to be a bigot is not fit to practice law…. You have to wonder if it had been any other minority-protected group, would this even be a question?”

The post NPOs calls for CUNY law school dean’s removal appeared first on World Israel News.

Cornel West has a compelling message. Instead of running a third-party campaign most voters won’t notice, he should grab the spotlight by challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Cornel West speaks at Harvard University on October 22, 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Paul Marotta / Getty Images)

Cornel West is running for president. He announced last Monday in a short video referencing issues including Medicare for All, “decent housing,” abortion rights, the war in Ukraine, and ensuring that everyone has “access to a job with a living wage.”

Dr West has a record of writing and activism on many of these issues that stretches back several decades. And he has a way of talking about them that conveys not just a political perspective but a deeply compelling moral vision. I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather see replace the deeply mediocre Joe Biden as president of the United States — to, as West said in a recent appearance on Democracy Now, become “the head of Empire to help dismantle it.”

Unfortunately, West is planning to run on the ballot line of an obscure third party. I doubt that as many as 1 percent of American voters even know that the “People’s Party” exists.

That’s a shame. West’s message is important, and if he’s going to spend the next year pouring his considerable energies into a run for the presidency, he should do it in the place where he could bring it to the largest audience that’s realistically available to him. He should challenge Joe Biden in the race for the 2024 Democratic nomination.

Cornel West Is Good, Actually

Writing in the Nation, Joan Walsh recites a litany of familiar liberal objections to West and concludes that it’s a terrible idea for him to run for president.

At one point, Walsh insinuates that West — a lifelong socialist — is becoming friendly to the political right. Her main piece of evidence is that he coauthored a short op-ed praising Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to let high school seniors apply for a state-funded scholarship by submitting their scores from the “Classics Learning Test.” While DeSantis is a deeply odious figure, the idea that West’s convergence with him on this relatively minor issue represents some sort of lurch to the right is absurd.

West has spent decades writing about the value of getting students to read Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, which explains his support. And he’s very thoroughly on record as disagreeing with most of what DeSantis stands for — as he said to Amy Goodman, he thinks DeSantis is the kind of person who would have sentenced Socrates to death. But he still sees value in the governor encouraging Florida students to read Socrates’s words. It’s a bit much for a supporter of Joe Biden, who just finished working with Republicans to negotiate a bipartisan debt ceiling deal that shrinks the welfare state, to get upset about Cornel West giving a Republican credit-where-credit’s-due for encouraging more Florida students to read Greek philosophy.

Walsh also floats the possibility that West’s turn against Barack Obama after 2008 was motivated by pique at personal sleights, like not being invited to the inauguration. But West’s hostility to Obama’s Wall Street–friendly administration is rooted in a worldview he’d held since at least the 1970s. West was an academic before he was a public figure, and his doctoral dissertation has long since been republished as a book called The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.

Ultimately, Walsh’s most basic objection to West’s run for president is that he’ll undermine Joe Biden and thus, she thinks, help Republicans.

He will only take votes away from Biden and help elect a Republican.

But even if he were to run as a Democrat, like [Marianne] Williamson and the deeply off Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he would still hurt Biden, because a primary gives the bored, supine media a reason to hype “Dems in disarray” stories.

There’s a tactical discussion to be had about whether socialists who live in states whose electoral votes are meaningfully “up for grabs” should hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil. But blaming third-party candidates or their voters when Democrats lose elections shifts blame away from politicians whose job it is to put forward a message that appeals to those voters. And the argument that even challenging Biden in the primaries is out of bounds because it would lead to news stories embarrassing to the incumbent is deeply antidemocratic.

Breaking the Duopoly?

Some socialists have the opposite objection to the idea of Dr West running as a Democrat. They object to America’s quasi-official “two-party system” and hope that a third-party run would undermine that system.

If that’s the goal, West would be better off running with the Green Party than the People’s Party. The latter is a pretty dubious outfit with a history of scandals and nothing resembling structures of internal democracy. And it has ballot access in far fewer states.

But the larger problem is that the two-party system can’t just be willed out of existence. It’s deeply entrenched. The Green Party got 3 percent of the vote two decades ago when it ran Ralph Nader and neither the Greens nor any other left-wing third party have come anywhere near replicating that result since.

Skeptics about the Democratic-primaries route often point to what happened in 2020, when the Democratic establishment lined up to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. But this is an odd argument. Bernie was getting about 35 percent of the vote in the primaries. That was enough to carry him to victory in the first three states. He lost because he couldn’t translate it into a majority when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and Bernie was facing a two-man race against Biden. If West got 4 percent as a candidate of the People’s Party, on the other hand, that would be little short of miraculous.

I agree that a real multiparty democracy — on the model of countries where it’s common to have a number of different parties jostling for power and occasionally forming coalition governments — would be far preferable to the narrowly constricted choices typically available to American voters. But I see very little evidence that third-party runs under present circumstances add up to any sort of contribution to making that vision a reality. It would probably take deep changes in the way American elections work, some of which would require amending the Constitution.

The last time a new major party came on the scene was Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which grew out of the antislavery wing of the Whigs. That was long before many of the current obstacles to new parties, like deeply unfair ballot access laws, were put in place. And even without those obstacles, the most likely scenario for the appearance of a new major party would be the same one that played out in the 1850s — a new party emerging out of a struggle within one of the existing major parties. There’s nothing even remotely resembling a precedent for one emerging from an act of will by a tiny band of activists.

Even if West runs as a Democrat, no one should deceive themselves — we’d still be talking about a very long shot. It’s legitimate to ask whether the Left’s energies would be better invested on other projects.

But West’s message is vitally important to the future of American democracy, and he’s a gifted messenger. If he’s going to do this, he should grab the biggest megaphone available to him. That means taking on Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Post Content

We all know the saying ‘better late than never,’ but for Bella Montoya, the expression would prove to be especially true. After falling into an unconscious trance-like state and being declared deceased, the 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was heard banging on her coffin during the wake she was being laid to rest. The bewildering incident, which occurred just four hours after Montoya was pronounced dead on Friday, has left many stunned and shocked.

Medical examiners had attributed Montoya’s death to a cardiopulmonary arrest. A doctor soon declared her dead after trying to resuscitate her. Astoundingly, video evidence shows medical personnel attending to Montoya while she lies out of her casket – very much alive. Her own son, Gilbert Balberán, described the event as a “miracle from God,” claiming that he was still getting to grips with what had transpired.

The elderly Montoya is now in stable condition, receiving care at the same hospital which declared her deceased. Ecuador’s Ministry of Health has set up a technical team to investigate why Murray’s death certificate had been emitted incorrectly. The grieving experience of Bella Montoya is not an isolated incident either – just last year, the same thing happened to the family of a 3-year-old Mexican girl at her funeral viewing.

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Donald Trump’s indictment was the biggest news of the week, but what was lost in the typical Trump absurdities of documents in ballrooms and bathrooms is the revelation of US plans to attack Iran.

Former president Donald Trump at a Georgia state GOP convention at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center on June 10, 2023 in Columbus, Georgia. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

The blockbuster news of the past week was Donald Trump’s latest indictment, this one on more robust ground than his first for the unprecedented act of prosecuting a former president. It’s worth reading the whole indictment, if for no other reason than the high comedy of Trump’s cartoonish levels of lawbreaking and self-incrimination: placing boxes upon boxes of classified documents in his bathroom and on stage in his ballroom in full public view, privately discussing how to lie to and mislead the FBI, and constantly telling visitors how very, very secret his documents are and how he shouldn’t even be showing them to people.

The case has monopolized national attention the past few days, with a broad range of commentators expressing outrage and condemning Trump for potentially compromising US nuclear secrets, weapons capabilities, defensive vulnerabilities, and plans for waging war on Iran.

Wait — war with Iran?

Yes, in a detail that’s been almost entirely glossed over, central to this case are a set of secret government plans for attacking Iran. Other than as a pure factual matter or to stress how recklessly Trump treated classified information, this has been little remarked upon, even as forthright condemnations of wars of aggression and paeans to international law have taken center stage in US political discourse over the past year.

The issue stems from Trump’s apparent frustration with what he claimed was a false narrative being pushed by the press: that after losing the 2020 election, under the advice of then–Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who was briefly removed from power before returning last November) and the coterie of Iran hawks he’d surrounded himself with, Trump was dangerously close to ordering strikes on Iran that could have triggered full-scale war, and had to be talked down from it by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

According to the indictment, in a recorded interview Trump gave at his New Jersey golf club in July 2021 to a writer and publisher working on an upcoming book, the former president maintained the reality of the situation was the exact opposite: that it was Milley and the Pentagon who were pushing for an attack on Iran on a reluctant Trump and that the classified documents he had kept were proof of this. Specifically, Trump showed them a “pages-long” set of plans for attacking Iran that he said were independently drawn up by the military and presented to him.

“This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump allegedly said, according to the indictment. “Except it is like, highly confidential.” (Hilariously, Trump also went on to say that “as president I could have declassified it” but “now I can’t,” one of many instances in the indictment of Trump effectively doing prosecutors’ job for them).

It’s difficult to know what to believe here. The original New Yorker article, which came out of interviews conducted by author Susan Glasser and her husband, New York Times reporter Peter Baker, points to reporting from the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender and the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig as corroboration, each of whom put out their own books about the final years of Trump’s presidency. But neither of those books features that particular episode.

In fact, while Rucker and Leonnig’s I Alone Can Fix It alleges that Milley told a confidante that he viewed preventing war with Iran before the 2021 inauguration as one of his “missions,” it also depicts Milley as one of the advisors urging on Trump’s drone assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani — the one-year anniversary of which fell on January 3, 2021, which was the reason there were fears of some kind of Iranian attack in Trump’s lame-duck period at all to begin with. Baker’s own reporting on that assassination at the time didn’t depict Milley in the best light, as he justified the reckless strike on the basis of reportedly vague intelligence about threats that didn’t actually come to pass.

On the other hand, Milley has been a voice of restraint on other wars, including during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump is a relentless, career-long liar.

Whatever the case, the bigger point here is that there are US war plans for Iran at all. One could argue that the military has to draw up potential plans for all kinds of contingencies (even if the fact that they allegedly passed it on to Trump suggests this was more than just a hypothetical, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency document filed away in obscurity).

But this comes in the midst of years of ratcheting up tensions between not just Iran and the United States, but maybe more dangerously, Iran and Israel. The latter’s government has been pushing the Biden administration to take a more aggressive posture posture toward Iran for years, pressure that has been ratcheted up under Netanyahu’s current hard-line government, which has carried out its own strikes inside Iran and done several major and threatening joint exercises with the US military, including one just last week.

More recently, the Discord leaks of Pentagon intelligence revealed that the CIA itself doesn’t know how serious Israel is about its threats to attack. Even so, the White House has signaled it would approve of whatever Israel decides to do, even if Israel ends up sparking a regional war or even drags the United States into the fray — a radical reversal of US posture under President Barack Obama.

And while Washington and Tehran have thankfully made recent progress in nuclear talks that Biden himself declared “dead” last year, that may not matter. Netanyahu, no doubt emboldened by the White House’s “ironclad” support, has more or less explicitly said that whatever agreement is struck, Israel won’t be bound by it and won’t consider Iran’s nuclear program stopped, justifying unilateral strikes regardless — even as the Pentagon’s own National Defense Strategy paper openly states that Iran not only doesn’t have a nuclear weapon but isn’t even currently pursuing one.

The existence of US war plans for Iran suggests it wouldn’t take much for Israeli attacks to draw the United States into yet another disastrous war, particularly if Iran retaliates, particularly if it winds up killing Americans in the process, whether intentionally or not. Any such war would be a calamity, not just for innocent Iranians but around the world, further destabilizing oil prices and adding to the economic havoc from the war in Ukraine that’s already caused much secondary human suffering, while potentially creating the conditions for a much bigger and more dangerous confrontation. Iran’s deepening alliance with Russia, after all, could draw Moscow into the war, turning the country into the second front of a global proxy battle between two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, while adding a third nuclear power, Israel, into the volatile mix.

We’re not nearly there yet. But it’s incumbent on all peace-loving people in the United States to work now, proactively, to stop this scenario from coming to pass — not just to ensure the past year’s rhetoric about illegal wars, imperialism, human rights, and international law isn’t mere hollow, cynical posturing, but to prevent even more needless death and suffering. Unfortunately, what seems like collective disinterest in the US-Israeli march to war in the press and otherwise doesn’t bode well for these efforts.

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