Israel ‘deeply impressed’ by Queens College response to Jew-hatred
Ofir Akunis, Israeli consul general in New York, thanked the public school's president “for not remaining silent and for standing up for truth and facts.”
Pro-Hamas demonstration in New York
Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, said on Thursday that he is “deeply impressed” by the support and commitment that Queens College has shown to Israeli students on campus.
The public college is part of the City University of New York system, in which many reported instances of Jew-hatred have been documented since Oct. 7. Queens College was one of the few schools that the Anti-Defamation League gave an “A” grade in its 2025 campus report card.
Akunis met on Wednesday with the president of Queens College, Frank Wu.
“I thanked President Wu, on behalf of the State of Israel, for not remaining silent and for standing up for truth and facts,” Akunis stated.
He also visited the Hillel on campus and met with community leaders, staff, students and faculty.
During his time on campus, Akunis made it a point to say that Qatar stands behind anti-Israel protesters on campus. “Just as it financed the construction of Hamas tunnels, it is now financing these campus protests. The truth must be exposed, and Qatar must be pressured to stop playing its double game,” he stated.
“Young crowds are chanting, ‘Globalize the intifada,’ without even understanding the practical implications of that phrase, destruction and the collapse of Western culture, all while exploiting American democracy to dismantle it from within,” he said.
“They shout ‘Death to America!’ alongside ‘Death to Israel!’ These calls demand clear and unequivocal condemnation—not understanding and certainly not silence,” he added.
Cruz reintroduces bill to designate Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists
The bill is the latest iteration of Cruz’s decade-long efforts to impose sanctions on the worldwide network that gave rise to Hamas and other Islamist terror organizations.
Speaking on his podcast on Monday, Cruz stated that the new iteration of the legislation uses a “bottom-up” approach to defining how the Brotherhood has supported terrorism.
“The challenge and some of the pushback we got is that not every one of the Brotherhood branches is currently violent, and so each of the branches doesn’t necessarily meet the criteria for designation, and that was an argument critics used to try to block the designation,” Cruz said on the podcast.
“We start by identifying all the branches that the Muslim Brotherhood supports that are terrorist groups or that commit terrorism, and then we designate the entire Brotherhood for that support,” he said. “In other words, we build up with what is explicitly and indisputably terrorist, and then we designate the Brotherhood as a whole for supporting those terrorist groups.”
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