Jewish Policy Center (Webinar Recordings – Audio Only)

Kurdish people span a broad area in the Middle East – across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. They constitute one of the largest ethnic groups without a state of their own, but have worked with the US – and with Israel – to create stability and security in the places they live. A longtime supporter of the Kurdish people, BG Audino recently spent time traveling in the region.

Join us as he explains how American interests can be enhanced by cooperative relations.

The American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, coordinated with Israel, has changed the trajectory of the Middle East.

Join us Monday for a conversation with Dr. Stephen Bryen, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense and an expert in security strategy and technology.

JPC Senior Director Shoshana Bryen was pleased to be invited to interview FDD President Clifford May at the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership meeting in Washington, DC on June 12, 2025. Because it preempted our usual podcast, we’re happy to bring you a video of their conversation..

“If you ask yourself what you would have done if you had lived in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, the answer is clear. What you do today, when antisemitism is again raising its ugly head across the world, is what you would have done then if you had been alive during the Holocaust.”

Tomas Sandell, founder of the European Coalition for Israel in 2003, summarizes the battle. “It is pivotal that we do not give up our streets in Europe to those groups who call for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews.”

Is the battle being won or lost?

President Donald Trump changed the format for American policy in the Middle East. He announced the capitulation of the Houthis in their war against AMERICAN shipping; invited Qatar and Syria – terror ties notwithstanding – to join the Abraham Accords along with Saudi Arabia; and made (limited) overtures to Iran. At the same time, he has ensured American weapons deliveries in full to Israel; has not commented on Israel’s new offensive in Gaza; and is participating with Israel in the movement of food. Israel remains firmly ensconced in USCENTCOM.

How is the US-Israel relationship changing? Join us for a conversation with Dr. David Wurmser, a Senior Analyst for Middle East Affairs at the Center for Security Policy as he tracks the shifts and their implications for Israel and for regional security.

Pundits like left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald portray pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas campus activists as underdogs battling Zionist-dominated university bosses. But when you listen to someone like Northeastern U. Professor of Political Science Max  Abrahms, who has had a front-row seat to observe the raw anti-Semitism that has flourished on US campuses since October 7, it seems clear that Greenwald and Company are peddling their own version of the Big Lie.

Aside from a few schools like Brandeis University  and Yeshiva University, scholars who are sympathetic to Israel are marginalized and forced into the shadows virtually everywhere else. Abrahms told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on Thursday. Professors say privately that to be a faculty member, you need to be  “anti-Zionist” and that if you dissent from this orthodoxy your career advancement opportunities will be limited.

Abrahms said  he supports the Trump administration’s efforts to use the threat of withholding federal aid to force schools to expel students who engage in violence and intimidation. But he expressed concern that the hostility to Israel is so ingrained that the federal pressure may not be sufficient to bring about reform.

Abrahms believes that  university administrators, not students, are chiefly to blame for the situation, calling them “an integral part of what’s wrong.” These administrators, he said, “create this atmosphere” where anti-Semitism can flourish.

So-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) plans aimed at helping victimized groups are “inherently anti-Semitic,” according to Abrahms. He said that when he attempted to meet the chief diversity officer at his own school, he was informed that they do not view anti-Semitism “as one of the things they are fighting.” Later, Abrahms learned that the head of the school’s Chabad organization had been told the same thing.

He believes that, by leveraging their financial support,  Jewish donors could create a powerful incentive for reform. According to Abrahms, professors sympathetic to Zionism currently  “face an incentive system geared toward keeping them silent.”

Donors “need to place conditions” on academic institutions they support, Abrahms said.   “That’s the only way to change things.”

In his new book, “Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites,”   Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Ilya Shapiro shows how  US higher education has been transformed away from a place where students  learn  how  to think critically, make cogent arguments and respect viewpoints that are different from their own.

Today, however, those schools  are more like indoctrination factories where students are taught to see themselves as  victims in need of “safe spaces” and entitled to respond violently if they are forced to confront people who dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

Recently, we’ve witnessed disturbing scenes where Jewish students are terrorized by Hamas backers at Columbia University and hundreds of other colleges across the United States,  At Stanford U.,  a mob of students –  egged on by the school’s  associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion – blocked US Appeals Court Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan from speaking. At Yale, the war against free speech became so disruptive that more than a dozen federal judges announced they would no longer hire law clerks from that school.

Most university administrators are “spineless cowards,”  Shapiro told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on Thursday. He added that these administrators opt to “capitulate to the mob” rather than lose opportunities to move up the career ladder in academia.

Shapiro emphasized that while hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, terroristic threats and physical violence are not.  He noted in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis was able to show that Students for Justice in Palestine,  a group that has been linked to much of the virulent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic activity on US campuses in recent years, has provided “material support” to a terrorist organization, Hamas in violation of the Florida and US codes.. As a result, SJP has been disestablished on Florida public university campuses.

The first round of revenge killings in Syria appears to be over. Don’t mistake that for calm.

Ankara and Damascus are negotiating a “peace treaty” that would allow Turkish troops to operate inside the country, and Turkey has begun efforts to take control of an airbase known as T-4, including the deployment of air defenses. Turkey claims it is “stabilizing” Syria.

Israel has a different view.

Join us for a discussion with Hazem Alghabra, a former US State Department official with roots in Syria. We will look at Turkey’s increasing control in Syria, the Syrian government’s acquiescence, and the Israeli government’s response. And there is always time for Iran.

JPC Senior Director Shoshana Bryen was invited by sister organization The RJC to host its program on April 8 with Eugene Kontorovich.

Summary: The International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 1998, was intended to prosecute the worst violations of human rights when national governments fail to act. Like many other international institutions, the ICC was created based on the highest ideals, says Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Law School. But ICC officials have come to realize that going after Israelis is easier than making a difference for global justice, he told a Republican Jewish Coalition webinar on Tuesday.

Last year, the ICC indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war-crimes charges in connection with Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas after October 7. And, in an effort to purportedly show “balance,” the court indicted three senior Hamas terrorists – Ismail Haniyeh, Muhammad Diff and Yahya Sinwar. All three are deceased.

In more than two decades of existence, the ICC, with an annual budget of more than $200 million, has prosecuted only six people. Numerous high-profile cases have collapsed, and dictators including Vladimir Putin of Russia have just ignored ICC indictments.

Efforts to impose sanctions against the ICC have been blocked by Democrats led by former Senate Majority Leader and current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Kontorovich was sharply critical of the Egyptian government’s refusal to open its border to Palestinians seeking to flee Gaza. He said Cairo is violating a legal obligation to open the border to refugees. He also discussed the legal concept of Uti Possidetis Juris and its application to the borders of Israel.

Foreign agitators who have who staged violent protests on US college campuses, cheering on the Hamas pogrom of October 7 and terrorizing Jewish students have no legal right to remain in the United States, according to Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky.

Many of those who  vandalized and destroyed property and buildings and   blocked access to classes and dormitories, were neither American citizens nor even students.  In reality, they were engaged in pro-terrorist activities, roaming  throughout the country to mobilize support for Hamas, which the United States  designated a terrorist group in 1997.

Yet, for more than a year, President Biden’s Justice Department refused to prosecute any of these cases, Von Spakovsky told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on Thursday. The Justice Department, he added, has authority to act against pro-Hamas thugs on campus under the Enforcement Act of 1870. That measure, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant,  gave federal prosecutors authority to target the Ku Klux Klan and its masked marauders who were terrorizing, assaulting  and killing Black Americans.

Today, this law is  codified at 18 USC  Section 241, and is particularly applicable to Hamas backers because of their proclivity for hiding behind masks. All of the masked Hamas terror supporters infesting US college  campuses were  “in disguise”  and therefore subject to prosecution for hindering other students from getting an education.

Under Section 241, violators are subject to heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison. The Trump administration has begun identifying these people and revoking their visas.

“All foreign students should have their visas revoked,” von Spakovsky said. “They should also be criminally prosecuted for threatening, dangerous behavior.”