Daily Kickoff
Good Thursday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we cover Columbia University’s potential moves toward complying with Trump administration demands as the parties work toward a restoration of federal funding for the school, and look at an effort by the Dubai-based Augustus Media to push a boycott of the e-commerce platform Shopify over its president’s support for a call for unbiased reporting about Israel. We also interview the Brown Medicine official who hired a researcher now accused of supporting Hezbollah, and have the scoop on a call from dozens of House Democrats for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to fire State Department official Darren Beattie. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Ted Comet, Sonia Friedman and Jeremy Boreing.
What We’re Watching
- President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order this afternoon instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to begin shuttering the department.
- Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) wraps up his trip to Israel today. Yesterday, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. More below.
What You Should Know
Shortly after Israeli airstrikes targeting senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials in the Gaza Strip began on Monday night, the messaging machine that is the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health kicked into high gear, Jewish Insider Executive Editor Melissa Weiss reports.
Within hours, headlines emerged alleging that hundreds of people had been killed in the targeted strikes, most citing the Gaza Ministry of Health — many without caveating that the ministry is run by Hamas, and that it does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
There were civilian casualties, to be sure. But the headlines and news reports earlier this week echoed the push notifications that emerged within minutes of an explosion near Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital in October 2023 — alleging that Israeli airstrikes on the hospital had killed 500 people.
Of course, that was not true. For starters, it was a misfired PIJ rocket that had struck the hospital complex — and not even the hospital itself, but a parking lot. Nearly a year and a half later, there is no final answer as to the number of people killed, but it is widely believed that the true number falls far short of the 500 immediately announced by the Gaza Health Ministry and quickly reported by nearly every major news outlet.
The implications of the misreporting were serious — in the wake of the false reports, broadcast by everyone from CNN to The New York Times, Jordanian King Abdullah II nixed a trip to the Hashemite Kingdom by then-President Joe Biden that had been slated for that week. Far-left members of Congress pounced on the headlines, accusing Israel of deliberately targeting medical facilities. One member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), still falsely blames Israel for the attack.
Why do news organizations repeatedly fall for the false, unverifiable statistics put out by Hamas?
There was no free press in Gaza before Oct. 7, 2023. But there also has not been one since — nearly all information that goes out of Gaza is filtered through Hamas. That’s why, in nearly a year and half of war, one might be hard-pressed to find Palestinian journalists in Gaza who have written articles unflattering to Hamas.
Israel, which restricts journalists’ access to Gaza to rare reporter embeds, does not make matters easier. The restrictions, which serve in part to protect Israeli troops whose movements could be given away, intentionally or unintentionally, by journalists on the ground, mean that most media outlets are reliant on Hamas-run ministries’ statistics, as well as reporting from stringers on the ground who are limited in their ability to report freely.
For months, Hamas-run ministries put out misinformation about the amount of aid entering Gaza. It took until spring 2024 — half a year into the war — for Israel’s COGAT to begin updating its website with the number of aid trucks entering the enclave each day, providing the only English-language statistics about the aid to counter Hamas’ false claims.
In the absence of a legitimate media presence in the Gaza Strip, content creators have filled the void, flooding TikTok and other social media platforms with “reporting” from Gaza that, at its worst, is intended to demonize the Jewish state in the public sphere. Some of these figures, whose social media profiles show them wearing “PRESS”-labeled flak jackets, have regularly praised senior Hamas and PIJ officials, even going so far as to post selfies with them.
Even the most venerated news outlets have fallen short. The Washington Post, which has faced numerous complaints over its coverage of the war, is now investigating old social media posts by an employee in the Post’s Cairo bureau who expressed solidarity “with the resistance as long as it is against the Zionist entity,” adding that she was “with Hamas and Hezbollah if their weapons are against Israel and not against Arabs like them.”
Axel Springer board member Martin Varsavsky earlier this week voiced his concerns with Politico’s publication of an Associated Press article that relied on Hamas statistics for its reporting.
Reporting in conflict zones is not for the faint of heart. It is grueling work that requires deep subject knowledge and an ability to discern between the truth and spin — something that many journalists covering the Israel-Hamas war lack. The power of the press is a privilege — one that Hamas has refigured into another weapon in its arsenal to attack Israel.
And as we saw with Al-Ahli, there can be real-world implications when journalists assume the talking points of a terrorist organization. It’s impossible to say how the trajectory of the war may have gone if Biden had continued on to Amman after visiting Israel in the first days after the Oct. 7 attacks.
But it’s not too late for journalists and media consumers to step back and objectively look at the information with which they are presented. That there was an immediate rush by news organizations earlier this week to accept the numbers put forward by Hamas underscores the degree to which the largely anti-Israel media narrative around the conflict has not changed in the 17 months since the war began.
classroom crackdown
Trump’s war on Columbia comes for Middle East studies
The field of modern Middle Eastern studies was born at Columbia University in the 1970s under the influence of Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian-American literature scholar and political activist. Now, the discipline as it currently exists may die there, too, as President Donald Trump seeks to rein in a field that has come under immense scrutiny following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. In a letter to Columbia’s president and trustees last week, the Trump administration issued a set of demands that it described as a precondition for beginning talks about Columbia’s “continued financial relationship with the United States government,” after $400 million in federal grants and contracts were pulled in response to Columbia’s alleged inaction against antisemitism, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Significant steps: The Wall Street Journalreported on Wednesday that Columbia was close to agreeing to meet Trump’s demands, which include banning masks, creating stronger campus disciplinary procedures, giving campus police more power and — most controversially, at least according to academics — putting the school’s Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under something the Trump administration described as an “academic receivership.” Doing so would be an unusual step, with management of the department transferred from its faculty to an external figure. Receiverships are already extraordinarily rare within academia; to have one mandated by the federal government is unprecedented. The push to put the department under receivership has lit a fuse under academics, many of whom — including some who are deeply critical of the increasingly radical tilt of the Middle Eastern studies field — worry that the move reeks of government censorship.
boycott call
Dubai-based Augustus Media pushes Shopify boycott over president’s tweet supporting fair reporting of Israel
A widely followed social media service in the United Arab Emirates is pushing a boycott campaign against Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce platform, after its president endorsed a recent social media comment critical of biased media coverage against Israel. In a series of dramatically worded Instagram posts on Wednesday, Smashi, a digital information service owned by the Dubai-based media group Augustus Media, took aim at Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, over a brief social media remark voicing agreement with a fellow tech entrepreneur who had denounced a news article for uncritically citing casualty figures provided by Hamas, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
Chain reaction: “Thx for saying this,” Finkelstein wrote on Tuesday, responding to a viral post from Martin Varsavsky, an outspoken board member of Axel Springer, the German publishing giant whose subsidiary, Politico, had run the Associated Press story Varsavsky dismissed as “one-sided Hamas support.” Smashi, in its framing of Finkelstein’s comment, said he had backed a “pro-Israel tweet defending Israel’s airstrikes” against Hamas, “adding fuel to the debate over the legitimacy of Israel’s military actions, which equate to a genocide, in Gaza.”
no comment
Former Brown Medicine official declines to say whether supporting Hezbollah would be job disqualifier
The doctor who hired Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University assistant professor and kidney specialist who was deported over the weekend to Lebanon after federal agents said she “openly admitted” to supporting Hezbollah, declined to say whether he would have hired her had he known about her support for terrorists, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports.
What he said: Dr. Douglas Shemin — the former chief of Brown Medicine’s Division of Kidney Diseases and Hypertension, who hired Alawieh in spring 2024 — told JI that Alawieh “had a very good background” that included medical training at Yale University. Asked whether he would have hired Alawieh if he had been made aware of her glorification of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, Shemin told JI he “can’t answer that question.”
scoop
House Democrats urge Rubio to immediately fire Darren Beattie
A group of 44 House Democrats is demanding that the State Department immediately fire Darren Beattie, the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, who has come under bipartisan criticism for past offensive comments and far-right affiliations, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. Beattie, who was fired from the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalist event, has voiced white supremacist views, demeaned Black people, women and other minorities and promoted a series of stances at odds with U.S. policy, including brushing off Chinese aggression and genocide of the Uyghur population and expressing support for Russia. Beattie had also personally attacked Secretary of State Marco Rubio online.
An ‘affront’ to U.S. diplomacy: “Darren Beattie’s white nationalist loyalties and public glorification of our adversaries’ authoritarian systems make him unqualified to serve as the top diplomat representing American values and culture to foreign audiences,” a group of House Democrats led by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) wrote to Rubio. “Darren Beattie’s position is an affront to U.S. public diplomacy efforts and he is unfit for any role at the State Department. We ask that you immediately and permanently dismiss him from the Department.”
sly solution
Palestinians push ICC alternative probe of Israel at U.N. Human Rights Council
The Palestinian Authority has been pushing the United Nations Human Rights Council to establish a mechanism to help foreign countries and the International Criminal Court prosecute Israelis after the Trump administration sanctioned the court, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov and Emily Jacobs report. The Palestinian representatives circulated a draft resolution in Geneva on Tuesday, ahead of a vote likely to take place at the end of the UNHRC’s current session, on April 3 or 4.
The resolution: The 10-page draft resolution, viewed by JI, would “establish an ongoing international investigative mechanism … to assist in the investigation and prosecution of persons responsible for the most serious crimes under international law committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” The forms of assistance would include “to collect, consolidate, preserve, and analyze evidence of violations of international law and human rights violations and abuses, and to prepare case files in order to facilitate and expedite fair and independent criminal proceedings.”
bARUCH DAYAN EMET
Ted Comet, lifelong Jewish leader, dies at 100
In 1946, Theodore “Ted” Comet, the 100-year-old Jewish communal leader who died on Wednesday, traveled to Versailles, France. It was the first leg of a lifelong journey of service to the Jewish community. Then 22, Comet volunteered through an American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee-funded program at a Jewish children’s orphanage, helping those who had lost their parents in the war, many of them Holocaust survivors. According to a story told at his funeral, shared with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Nira Dayanim by JDC’s CEO, Ariel Zwang, Comet brought a piece of paper with him — on it, the name of an acquaintance’s cousin who had survived. As it turned out, the cousin was Elie Wiesel, with whom Comet forged a deep bond with until Wiesel’s death in 2016.
Advisor to many: From when Comet first arrived in the city until his death this week, he remained involved in the Jewish organizational world, acting as an advisor to groups such as JPro — and according to American historian Jonathan Sarna, an unofficial advisor to many more. Sarna recalled catching up with Comet whenever he visited his daughter in Massachusetts. The two would sit next to each other in synagogue, and talk “perhaps too much,” about the goings on of the Jewish communal world. “I’ve had the privilege of knowing some of the great Jewish leaders in the United States, and he’s one of them,” Sarna told eJP. “I especially will remember his active mind. He was someone for whom nothing Jewish was really alien to him, and who had a real love of the Jewish people broadly and a desire to strengthen the Jewish world.”
Read the full story here and sign up for eJewishPhilanthropy’s Your Daily Phil newsletter here.
Worthy Reads
DEI Dilemma: The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch looks at how the Trump administration’s decision to cut $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University is affecting the institution’s medical school. “The cuts have already had significant effects. Because medical-research funding is such a large share of federal support for higher education, Columbia’s med school has borne the brunt of the funding cuts. This makes the punishment seem even more arbitrary — the medical school is several miles away from the campus where the bulk of the pro-Palestinian protests occurred. Columbia’s cancer center has stopped work on several clinical trials for disease treatment and symptom management, Dawn Hershman, an oncologist, told me. Hershman said that, unlike many of her colleagues, she isn’t convinced that there is any DEI-specific pattern to the cuts thus far; even so, her lab has been modifying clinical research to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI directives. ‘This type of disruption costs money and time — time that people with cancer don’t have,’ she said. [Domenico] Accili, who leads the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, had to stop work on a clinical trial that had tracked patients since the 1990s. Because he can’t finish the study, all the data are unusable, he told me.” [TheAtlantic]
Solomon’s Successor: The Financial Times’ Joshua Franklin looks at the succession race at Goldman Sachs, where COO John Waldron is the favorite to succeed CEO David Solomon when the latter retires. “Interviews with more than 20 of his current and former colleagues, clients and other people familiar with Waldron’s career paint a picture of a well-liked client whisperer known for his relentless work ethic and ability to build bridges between the bank’s different businesses. He has remained a close ally of Solomon while retaining the support of the bank’s 400-odd partners, despite both men’s involvement in the bank’s costly misadventure in consumer banking. But there is a perception in some quarters that Waldron can be too much of a people pleaser to make the tough decisions required to run a bank like Goldman. He will have to show that he can thrive without Solomon, who has guided his career since even before he first recruited Waldron more than 20 years ago. ‘The world has never seen a John without David’s input,’ said one person who has worked with both men. ‘None of us know what that is.’” [FT]
Cairo Conundrum: In The Wall Street Journal, Eugene Kontorovich posits that Cairo’s refusal to allow Gazans to cross into Egypt violates U.S. policy and should subject it to lose foreign aid funding from Washington. “With great chutzpah, President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is using U.S. aid to thwart U.S. policy. Egypt is America’s second-largest regular military aid recipient. Israel is first, but the $1.5 billion Cairo receives makes up nearly a quarter of its military budget. U.S. assistance to both countries flows from the 1979 Camp David Accords. Thus American taxpayers are paying to hold an iron curtain down on Gaza and maintain a status quo of war and oppression. Mr. Trump’s plan for reconstructing Gaza is premised on allowing the population to flee the territory for a better life elsewhere. The humanitarian need for this is urgent. This week’s renewal of large-scale hostilities after a failed cease-fire will inevitably entail the dislocation of many Gazans. That isn’t Israel’s goal, which is to rescue hostages and
Word on the Street
Israel intercepted a ballistic missile fired by the Houthis overnight; the projectile, which set off sirens across central Israel, was intercepted before crossing into Israeli territory…
Hours before the interception, President Donald Trump warned that the Iran-backed group in Yemen would be “completely annihilated” by U.S. strikes and called on Iran to “immediately” halt its weapons shipments to the militant group…
The letter sent by Trump earlier this month to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave Tehran a two-month deadline to reach a new nuclear agreement with the West…
The Pentagon removed at least half a dozen articles about the Holocaust from Department of Defense websites, as part of a broader effort to remove “diversity” content from federal websites…
The Department of Defense is weighing a restructuring of the military’s senior echelon that could include widespread cuts as well as the merging of different regional commands…
Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp met withTrump administration allies in Washington this week, days after the administration issued an executive order barring employees of the law firm from accessing federal buildings and ordering federal agencies to sever their contracts with the firm…
The FBI announced a $15 million reward for information that leads to the apprehension of a Chinese national charged last year by the Biden administration with smuggling weapons to Iran…
Sixty-two House members, led by the Democratic and Republican co-chairs chairs of the House antisemitism task force, urged the administration to nominate a “qualified” antisemitism envoy “as soon as possible”…
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told state lawmakers that she plans to prioritize legislation for a partial public mask ban, citing the use of masks by individuals committing crimes in an effort to evade identification…
Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner dropped his proposal to evict a local theater over its screening of “No Other Land,” the Oscar winner for Best Documentary that focuses on clashes between the IDF and Palestinians in a West Bank town…
Puck looks at the yearslong legal saga between former Marvel Chairman Ike Perlmutter and his neighbor, Harold Peerenboom…
A New York judge ordered that the deportation case of a former Columbia University graduate student be moved to New Jersey, citing a law requiring cases to be heard in the jurisdiction in which an individual was held at the time that a lawsuit challenge was filed…
The University of California system will stop requiring job applicants to submit diversity statements…
The University of Pittsburgh chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine received an interim suspension from the school, stemming from a campus sit-in organized by the group during the fall semester…
Immigration authorities detained a Georgetown University researcher from India whose wife’s family was alleged to have ties to Hamas…
Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing is stepping down but will remain with the company in an advisory role; Boreing co-founded the Daily Wire in 2015 with Ben Shapiro and co-CEO Caleb Robinson, who will become the company’s sole CEO…
The New York Times spotlights Broadway producer Sonia Friedman, whose shows have picked up the Tony Award for Best Play for five of the last six years…
Newly unearthed documents in the archives of Israel’s Yad Vashem are providing extensive details about the Jewish children who were evacuated from Nazi Europe to the U.K. on the Kindertransport in the months prior to the outbreak of WWII…
The New York Times looks at the legal debate over the Guelph Treasure, whose Jewish owners sold their portions of the art trove under duress in Nazi Germany…
Bank of Israel Deputy Governor Andrew Abir was approved for an additional five-year term; Abir’s reappointment by the Israeli government had been delayed several weeks over debates around the bank’s institutional independence…
The Washington Post interviews relatives and loved ones of some of the remaining 59 hostages in Gaza about the resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas…
In a post on X, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “In America and in Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will”; Netanyahu first posted the tweet on his official account, before deleting it an hour later and reposting it from his personal account…
An Israeli businessman living in the Gulf was recorded saying that he transferred money from a U.S.-based lobbyist for Qatar to a senior aide to Netanyahu…
Israel was ranked eighth in the World Happiness Report’s annual list of the most and least happy countries in the world…
French President Emmanuel Macron said that a 35-year-old French national who had been detained in Iran for two and a half years has been repatriated and is undergoing medical tests at a hospital in France…
J. Philip Rosen was unanimously selected to lead the American section of the World Jewish Congress…
Mother Jones co-founder and editor Jeffrey Klein died at 77…
Pic of the Day
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) a silver pager, a nod to Israel’s operation last fall against Hezbollah that detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the terror group’s members in Lebanon, Lebanon, killing 32 and injuring thousands, during their meeting in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs reports.
Birthdays
NYC-based comedian, his most recent show centers on a meeting of neo-Nazis that he attended incognito in Queens, Alex Edelman turns 36…
Retired consultant on public policy issues to IBM, Ford and Citicorp, among others, he was the chair of the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights, Norman Ira Gelman turns 96… Rabbi and human rights activist, he has served for over 60 years as the senior rabbi of NYC’s Park East Synagogue, Arthur Schneier turns 95… Stage and screen actor, television director and musician, best-known role as the title character in the television comedy series “Barney Miller,” Hal Linden (born Harold Lipshitz) turns 94… Pioneer of financial futures, he is the chairman emeritus of CME Group, Leo Melamed turns 93… Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences as a geologist and oceanographer, but known popularly as poet and performer, Alexander Gorodnitsky turns 92… Australian award-winning writer of Portuguese Sephardi descent, author of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays and poetry collections, David George Joseph Malouf turns 91… Senior advisor to the family office of Charles Bronfman, he was previously SVP and COO of UJA-Federation of New York, Dr. Jeffrey R. Solomon turns 80… Senior lecturer of Talmud at Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Rabbi Tzvi Berkowitz turns 74… Award-winning author of 26 children’s books, Louis Sachar turns 71… Owner of Diamond Point Metals, Jack Zager… Former professional tennis player, Bruce Manson turns 69… Philanthropist, visionary, pioneer in corporate social responsibility, formerly CEO of family-owned Timberland, Jeffrey Swartz turns 65… Retired as Israel’s chief of police in 2018 after a 27-year prior career at Shabak (a/k/a the Shin Bet), Roni Alsheikh turns 62… Host of “Time Team America,” a PBS program, she also produced and directed a feature-length documentary titled “Our Summer in Tehran,” Justine Shapiro turns 62… Chilean businessman with substantial mining interests, in 2014 he donated seven newly written Sefer Torah scrolls to synagogues on six different continents, Leonardo Farkas turns 58… Former member of the Knesset for the Blue and White alliance, he served as Minister of Justice, Avraham Daniel (Avi) Nissenkorn turns 58… Journalist, author and lecturer, he is an editor-at-large for Esquire, Arnold Stephen “A.J.” Jacobs turns 57… Actor, podcast host, director and comedian, has appeared in more than sixty films, Michael Rapaport turns 55… First-ever Jewish mayor of Lansing, Mich., now in his second term, Andy Schor turns 50… Award-winning Israeli actress, her credits include a role in “Fauda,” Netta Garti turns 45… Actor, music video director and writer, he is the son of Dustin Hoffman, Jake Hoffman turns 44… Head of global strategic partner sales within the financial services group at Amazon Web Services, Daniel M. Eckstein… Senior speechwriter and messaging strategist for Apple, Matt Finkelstein… Assignment editor at The Washington Post, Benjamin (Benjy) Sarlin… Director of real estate development for a N.Y.-based hedge fund, Jason Lifton… Comedian, writer and actress who gained popularity through her comedy videos on YouTube, Joanna Hausmann turns 36… Talmud teacher and secretary of the committee of Jewish law and standards at the Rabbinical Assembly, Max Buchdahl… Hacker success manager at Bugcrowd, Tatiana Uklist turns… Ehud Lazar…
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