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The Lawfare Project offers pro bono legal services to the growing list of victims of anti-Semitic assaults in the United States.
By United with Israel Staff
Following a rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, The Lawfare Project, a global network of legal professionals that defends the civil and human rights of Jewish people and the pro-Israel community, is offering its services free of charge to any victims who have suffered anti-Semitic hate crimes.
“Our community is under siege,” the organization said in a statement on Monday. “While Jews across the United States celebrated Chanukah last week, there were at least nine anti-Semitic assaults in the New York area alone. We’ve been sounding the alarm about this crisis for a long tim,e and the media finally seems to be taking notice.
“Today, The Lawfare Project is announcing a new partnership with Ken Belkin of Spodek Law Group to offer pro bono legal services to victims of anti-Semitic assaults.”
The joint team already represents Lihi Aharon, an Israeli woman who faced a vicious and violent anti-Semitic attack on a New York City subway earlier this month.
In that incident, of which there is a video recording, a Quran-quoting woman harassed Aharon, shouting, “Serpent Jew! You f**king nasty a** Jew. You nasty motherf**ker. You a nasty a** motherf**ker, you stink. You f**king stinkin’ a** Jew.”
Lawfare has also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against Columbia University on behalf of Jonathan Karten, a Jewish Israeli-American undergraduate student at the school.
Karten told the Jerusalem Post that at Columbia he “learned to become far too comfortable with anti-Israel sentiment, anti-Israel bias that often bleeds into anti-Semitism,” but was shaken out of his stupor when “a well-known professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University endorsed Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam terrorist brigade.”
The complaint states that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being used by faculty and student groups “to legitimize discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students because of the latter group’s race, religion and national identity….when it comes to Jewish and Israeli students, the Columbia administration has allowed a severely pervasive and hostile environment to persist, where said students (and faculty) are harassed, singled out and discriminated against under the guise of ‘pro-Palestinian’ advocacy,” the Post reported.
The Columbia University case is the first filed since President Donald Trump’s “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” went into effect on December 11, 2019. The order grants Jewish students the same protections as other minority groups.
According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, there were 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in 2018.
“The real number is likely much higher, as so many go unreported,” The Lawfare Project said. “It’s time we fight back,”
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