Far-right activist Nick Fuentes continues to gain momentum.

Former state House Speaker Mark Rozzi (D-Berks) said he wore a bulletproof vest for several months in 2022 when he was the target of a politically motivated stalker.

During an interview last week with the Capital-Star on an unrelated subject, Rozzi revealed that he had been harassed by the man, who was not a constituent but lived nearby in the Reading area. He said the episode contributed to his decision to get out of politics.

“There comes a time when you know it’s time to leave,” Rozzi said, adding that the polarized politics of the last several years made leading as a moderate lawmaker difficult. “You constantly had to look over your shoulder.”

The reality of political violence in America loomed over a day of peaceful demonstrations Saturday in which millions protested the Trump administration and its aggressive deportation tactics.

Early Saturday morning, former Minnesota state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated by a gunman posing as a police officer who knocked on their door. Democratic Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were also shot multiple times earlier in the night at their home and are expected to survive.

Pennsylvania has also been affected by politically motivated violence this year. An attacker firebombed the Governor’s Residence on April 13, after the first night of Passover. It forced Gov. Josh Shapiro, his wife and their children to evacuate in the middle of the night.

Cody Balmer, the Harrisburg man charged with the attack, later told authorities he hated Shapiro and disagreed with the governor’s support for Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.

Shapiro called on leaders across the country to speak with moral clarity after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced Hortman’s death Saturday morning.

“This is unacceptable — we all have a responsibility to stand up and work to defeat the political violence that is tearing through our country,” he said. “America is better than this.”

Rozzi could not be reached over the weekend to comment on the Minnesota shootings.

The Exeter Township man who faced misdemeanor charges for harassing Rozzi and his then-girlfriend died before the case was set to go to trial last year, Berks County District Attorney John Adams confirmed. The accused stalker had a history of unusual behavior in which he expressed a willingness to “die in combat.”

Rozzi, who served as speaker in early 2023 when control of the House was uncertain, said the man was allegedly motivated by a belief that former President Joe “Biden and the Democrats were going to destroy America.”

Adams identified Rozzi’s stalker as Victor Greer, 56, who died in June 2024, when the case was “very close to going to trial.” The most serious charge against Greer was a third-degree misdemeanor, Adams said.

“This individual was definitely harassing and stalking him and his then-girlfriend and I’m sure it was somewhat traumatic,” Adams said.

About a decade before he died, Greer was arrested in Manhattan on weapons charges.

Officers pulled over Greer for driving the wrong way on a one-way street around 1 a.m. July 2, 2014, and spotted ammunition and three knives inside the car, according to reports.

In the center console of Greer’s vehicle, police found a note that said “I want to die in combat and want to go to heaven and meet god,” and also mentioned his cats, his parents and his favorite movies, authorities said.

The New York Police Department bomb squad searched the car’s trunk and found two unloaded semi-automatic rifles, a semiautomatic handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, more than 400 rounds of ammunition, a bottle rocket and drug paraphernalia, Reading-area TV station WFMZ reported.

Rozzi was elected speaker in January 2023 after Democrats won a one-vote majority in the House in the previous November election. One incumbent Democrat had been reelected despite dying weeks before the election and two others resigned to take higher offices, leaving control of the House to be decided in special elections.

After Democrats were unable to muster votes to elect current Speaker Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia), Rozzi struck a deal with Republicans in which he agreed to become an independent to secure GOP support to elect him as speaker. He won the 115-85 vote with 16 Republicans joining Democrats’ unanimous support.

Rozzi told the Capital-Star last week that he had always considered himself politically moderate and felt he was getting lost in the House where the parties seemed to be moving farther apart.

“I was a nonexistent type of person,” Rozzi said.

Rozzi said he planned use his speakership to pass legislation to provide a two-year window for victims of childhood sexual abuse to sue their abusers and those who enabled them. Legislation to hold a referendum on amending the state constitution to provide the window had passed in the previous session with bipartisan support, but was derailed by an administrative error.

He faced opposition from Republicans, including a key ally who called for him to resign, when his promised switch from Democrat to independent never happened.

Rozzi said he’s hopeful the state Senate will act on the survivors’ window amendment this session. The legislation passed the House earlier this month.

A Commonwealth Court panel last week upheld the right of abuse victims to sue public agencies for enabling their abuse under a law Rozzi passed in 2019, which he described as gratifying knowing that it would help protect children.

“I’m happy to look back but I’m also happy to not be there,” Rozzi said.

After leaving office, Rozzi said he started working on an autobiographical book about his abuse and his rise to speaker. He said his chances of getting back into politics are slim, although he said he would consider running for state Senate if the seat was in danger of being lost.

For now, Rozzi said he’s doing “a ton of writing,” enjoying “being able to breathe,” and is looking forward to getting out of town for a while.

“Twelve years is a long time,” he said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”

“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”

Schrecker is the author of many books about the McCarthy era, Cold War politics and right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Her recent piece for The Nation is headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s crackdown on academic institutions in the United States was the focus of protests and commencement speeches this week as universities like Harvard held commencement ceremonies.

The Trump administration has now directed federal agencies to review all remaining contracts with Harvard, after it already canceled nearly $3 billion in federal research grants for the university and moved last week to revoke its ability to enroll international students. Harvard has two separate suits pending against Trump, arguing the moves violate due process, as well as free speech protections under the First Amendment because they target the university’s staff, curriculum and enrollment.

In his address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony Thursday, Stanford University professor, doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese praised the school’s defiance of Trump and spoke to students facing threats of deportation or having their visas revoked.

DR. ABRAHAM VERGHESE: When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least — who had at least one his medical school classmates tortured and disappear. … More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. … So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the novelist and medical doctor, Ethiopian Indian American, Dr. Abraham Verghese addressing Harvard’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. His latest book, The Covenant of Water.

Meanwhile, down the road in Cambridge, the Indian American class president at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about how MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union had voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with Israel. Megha Vemuri wore a red-and-white keffiyeh and said MIT students would never support a genocide, and praised them for continuing to protest despite, quote, “threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially,” she said, “your own university officials.”

MEGHA VEMURI: Last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military. You called for a permanent cease fire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed, because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.

Right now while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it. The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with. This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now, as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties.

AMY GOODMAN: That was MIT class president Megha Vemuri, now Indian American graduate of MIT.

This comes as Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — another school facing attacks by the Trump administration — writes for The New Yorker magazine this week about how, quote, “Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege.” In his piece headlined “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close,” he describes how he consulted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, along with other deans at Columbia. They spoke about government repression on college campuses in the 1950s through to the present. Schrecker told him, quote, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse,” he quoted her saying.

Well, we begin today with Ellen Schrecker in person, joining us in our New York studio. She’s the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Schrecker is also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. And she just wrote a piece for The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.” Schrecker has been active in the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, since the 1990s. I should note she has three degrees from Radcliffe Harvard and formerly taught there. She’s a graduate of Radcliffe 1960.

Ellen Schrecker, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. As we look at these universities under attack, you’ve studied higher education for over half a century. Let’s talk about what was happening then and what’s happening today.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK. The main thing that happened then to universities was that about a hundred faculty members, most of them with tenure, were fired and blacklisted. That happened in every major institution of civil society within the United States. And although the universities pride themselves on academic freedom — whatever that means — they collaborated with the forces of repression through — that were actively imposing a climate of fear and self-censorship throughout American society.

Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it. I don’t know what it’ll be. But during the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left, in the past and in the present, then present. Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to start off — we have a very young audience. We also have their parents and their grandparents around the world. And I’d like you to start off by talking about who McCarthy is. What do we mean by the McCarthyism of, for example, the 1950s?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK, that’s a very good way to start, because McCarthyism, unfortunately, is misnamed. It is not just the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came in onto the stage of history in 1950 after the “ism” that he gave his name to had been really dominating American domestic politics since the late 1940s. ’47 is when the Truman administration imposed a loyalty test, an anti-communist loyalty test, on its employees.

So, if we wanted to name this phenomenon of political repression, anti-communist political repression — and I want to specify that it didn’t attack randomly people on the left, but very specifically people who had some kind of connection, usually in the past, with the communist movement, that during the 1930s and ’40s was the most dynamic force on the left, even though it was a very flawed, very flawed political group. It was nonetheless very influential on the left. And if we wanted to give that political repression of the 1940s and ’50s a name, it should have been Hooverism, after the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, the movie Good Night and Good Luck, they showed real black-and-white footage of McCarthy, and test audiences thought he was too harsh, unrealistic, not realizing it was actual footage. And now you have Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway, George Clooney starring in it, and it is the financially most successful Broadway show we’ve seen, is going to be now for free on CNN in a few days. But the significance of that, that that — what people feel today was a cartoon character was, in fact, much harsher and sharper than people ever dreamed?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, he was beyond the pale, because, like the current president, he had no guardrails, as it were.

AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention Roy Cohn, his sidekick in the hearings, who would later go on to mentor Donald Trump, until, at the very end of his life, Donald Trump rejected him when he was dying of AIDS.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly. So, there are lots of similarities with the fact that there’s this very aberrant character at the heart, or at the sort of public heart, of this repressive movement. But what we should have known in the '40s and ’50s, and should know now, is it's not just a one-man show. It has been this moment of trying to crack down on dissent, constitutional dissent, free speech, the ability to say what Israel is doing in Gaza is a terrible thing. That is something that has been building up for decades. And that was the same thing during McCarthyism. There was a kind of network of right-wing activists, similar to groups today, like the Heritage Society, that brought us the 2025 Project blueprint for Trump’s attack on the institutions of civil liberties and civil society, that has come to fruition since he entered the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, you speak as a Jewish author, active member of the American Association of University Professors. Would you say that the McCarthyism of yesteryear is the charges that President Trump, with his sidekick Elon Musk giving the “Heil Hitler” salute, charging antisemitism for what he’s doing?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Antisemitism is a pretext. We know that. Trump has been all his life a racist, clearly befriending these fascist individuals and groups for years. And what we’re seeing is a kind of a melding of Trump’s own right-wing proclivities, reactionary proclivities, pro-fascist proclivities, with a long-term attempt within some pro-Zionist organizations to eliminate all support for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian liberation from American universities, in particular, but from within American society.

AMY GOODMAN: You have, earlier this month, a federal judge, Geoffrey Crawford, ordering the release of Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from a prison in Vermont. He was picked up by masked, hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview in Vermont. He was beyond holding a green card. The judge writing in his ruling, quote, “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920” and during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. And I wanted to take it beyond that. You note that, you know, that we’re not just talking about individual professors anymore. We’re talking about current attacks being much broader. And you write that — this interesting paradox, quote, “despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention.” Why is it weaker?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: It’s weaker for two reasons. One, because the state is stronger. The state does much more with regard to higher education than it did in the 1950s. You know, it supports most important basic scientific research. It regulates things on campus with regard to, shall we say, diversity, equity and inclusion, with trying to ensure that all Americans have a good shot at higher education. That was a push by the federal government. So, you can see that the government is much more involved. It funds student loans. Most smaller universities without huge endowments rely on students who have to get federal loans in order to pay tuitions. So, what he’s doing by withdrawing federal money from higher education is, essentially, threatening to destroy American higher education today.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking in March following the arrest of the Columbia graduate student, now graduated graduate student, albeit he was in jail in Louisiana when he got his diploma at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If you tell us, when you apply, “Hi. I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,” if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, “And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities,” if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Trump administration not proven any of this. And a number of students have been released from prison, with very angry judges talking about “Where are the grounds for these people to be imprisoned?” Mahmoud Khalil has been now imprisoned for three months as his little baby was born here in New York. If you can talk about what this leads to, these kind of harsh attacks, when it comes to speech and when it comes to universities? You were just addressing the deans at Columbia University. Some compare Harvard not fighting — Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and Columbia conceding, and the pressure it’s put on its students.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, this has been a constant in the history of American higher education to collaborate with political repression. They, universities, do not fight back. They didn’t fight back during the McCarthy period. They’re not — were not fighting back, until this miracle. It really was a miracle, totally unexpected, of the president at Harvard saying, “No, I cannot go along with what you were asking.” And what they were —

AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish president at Harvard, right?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: He’s Jewish, right.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Garber, who President Trump is accusing of antisemitism.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Well, of course, we’re all antisemites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.

But what we’re seeing is the beginning of a pushback against what Trump is doing, what his entire apparatus of hoodlums, I think, is trying to do to the universities. And that wonderful quote you had from Secretary of State Rubio, when he said, you know, paraphrasing these supposed terrorists, that they wanted to shut down the universities, he’s doing more to shut down the universities than probably anybody else in America at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Threatening to revoke the visas of all —

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: — international students. What about the role of your organization, the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Right. We are a group that is over a hundred years old. And when we were founded, it was a period very much like today, where outsiders, politicians and especially very wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees, were interfering with what faculty members were saying and doing with regard to — at that point, there was a lot of labor unrest and attempts to create unions. And university professors were sort of saying, “Well, look at the working conditions under which American workers are being oppressed. Let’s do something about industrial accidents and things like that.” Today, we’re seeing that, in every way, the federal government, state legislators interfering with the academic work of university professors. And that is what my organization is trying to do, is to protect the integrity and the educational value of what goes on on American campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope, in this last minute we have together?

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yes, because, unfortunately, we have no model we can follow from McCarthyism, because there was no pushback, but today we’re seeing people marching to commencement at Harvard wearing labels saying, you know, “Enough is enough, President Trump. “We’re seeing huge crowds showing up to welcome Mohsen coming back from Vermont after having been picked up by ICE.

We’re seeing a growing movement within civil society, that has to be maintained, and has to be maintained for years. I mean, the damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education. So, we’ve got to get out there in the trenches and even begin to think some more about: OK, if they’re not paying attention to the judges, if the Supreme Court folds — and let us pray that it does not — what do we have to do?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump,” as well as Jelani Cobb’s piece in The New Yorker that extensively quotes you, Ellen Schrecker, at democracynow.org.

NOW READ: 'Catastrophic': Trump is now going after 'the best idea we ever had'

When the United States starts a trade war with your country, how do you fight back? For individuals, one option is to wage a personal trade war and boycott products from the US.

Donald Trump deserves ample credit for brokering the ceasefire in Gaza, the return of Israel's hostages, and the surge of humanitarian aid that may prevent a worse catastrophe for the suffering Palestinians. Should he feel that he has not received enough praise, he will laud himself until nobody can bear to hear another word.

But among the many ironies surrounding this moment, one fact seems central: There would be no deal if Trump and his negotiating team had not abandoned their longstanding opposition to a Palestinian state -- and forced the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu to accept that change against their will.

Only weeks ago, Trump denounced the European recognition of Palestine as a "reward" to Hamas for the "horrible atrocities" perpetrated on Oct. 7, 2023. He mocked France in particular, saying that its official support of a Palestinian state "doesn't matter" and didn't "carry any weight."

Yet in hindsight, the Europeans were clearly correct to insist that only the revival of a two-state solution, much mocked in the United States, would create conditions for a ceasefire and a serious peace plan. Trump undoubtedly learned as much in his consultations with his friends (and business partners) in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia -- who could not have brought sufficient pressure on Hamas to agree to the deal's terms, including its own disarmament and sidelining, without that fundamental concession. To be acceptable to those regimes, from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi to Doha to Ankara, any resolution had to include a Palestinian state.

That is among the reasons why the 20-point agreement that undergirds this ceasefire, and today's joyous release of hostages and prisoners on both sides, is worth reading in full. It outlines a process for rebuilding and restoring Gaza that junks Trump's earlier schemes to throw all the Gazans out of their homes for a gold-plated Mediterranean Las Vegas.

Instead, the deal envisions a transitional period that will conclude with a "reformed" Palestinian Authority resuming governance of the strip, and pledges, in clause 12, that "No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza."

The framework for rebuilding "a better Gaza" includes various ideas that must have appealed to Trump, including a special board of world leaders including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the U.S. president will chair. Whether those details can be sustained will be seen as the region's future unfolds.

For reasons best known to the negotiators, however, the most important clauses were reserved for last -- perhaps because they depend on the implementation of the prior clauses, perhaps because they were resisted by Israel until the very end. Set down in print, they make an indisputable departure from the hard-right positions of the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government.

The existence of a Palestinian state has long been anathema not just to Trump and Netanyahu but to the Republican right in Washington. Last month, Republican members of Congress sent a message to our allies in Europe and Canada scolding them for recognizing a nascent Palestine. Like Trump, who deleted the GOP's traditional platform plank supporting a two-state solution, they were content to undercut the Palestinians and allow Israel free reign everywhere from Jerusalem and the West Bank to the Golan Heights.

The stark difference between then and now is stated firmly in clauses 19 and 20 of the Trump deal, which make a promise that the world will have to redeem:

"19. While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.

"20. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence."

All the parties to this deal face a long and demanding path toward those worthy goals, and their sincerity will be tested repeatedly along the way. There can be little doubt that Netanyahu and perhaps Trump too will attempt to stall and undo those historic changes. But if the American president deserves the acclaim he is receiving today, it is largely owed to his public renunciation of the hardliners in his own party and the Israeli right.

As the US House of Representatives votes for a resolution demanding the release of files relating to the late sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein, a new series of investigations is digging into an area of the disgraced financier’s life that has largely evaded scrutiny: his extensive ties with Israeli intelligence.

Epstein’s relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001.

The emails span the years 2013-16, beginning just before Barak concluded his nearly six-year tenure as Israel’s minister of defense. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein’s closest associates, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he visited the financier’s estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as “the Prime Minister,” but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein’s private Caribbean island when she was 18. In past court filings, Giuffre accused Barak of sexually assaulting her. Barak has categorically denied those allegations and said he was unaware of Epstein’s activities with minors during the time of their friendship.

Emails between Barak and Epstein have served as the basis for the ongoing investigative series published since late September by the independent outlet Drop Site News, which used them to unearth Epstein’s extensive role in brokering intelligence deals between Israel and other nations.

The emails reveal that between 2013 and 2016, the pair had “intimate, oftentimes daily correspondence,” during which they discussed “political and business strategy as Epstein coordinated meetings for Barak with other members of his elite circles.”

The investigation comes as President Donald Trump’s extensive ties to Epstein face renewed scrutiny in Congress. On Wednesday, just a day after Drop Site published the fourth part of its series, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a new trove of documents from Epstein’s private estate.

Among them were emails sent in 2011 from Epstein to his partner and co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell, in which he said the then private-citizen Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of his sex trafficking victims, referring to Trump as a “dog that hasn’t barked.”

Murtaza Hussain, one of the Drop Site reporters who has dug into Epstein’s Israel connections, told Democracy Now! on Wednesday that the focus on Trump, while important, has diverted attention from other key tendrils of Epstein’s influence.

“There’s been a lot of justifiable focus on Epstein’s very grave crimes and facilitation of the crimes of others related to sex trafficking and sex abuse,” Hussain said. “But one critical aspect of the story that has not been covered is Epstein’s own relations to foreign governments, the US government, and particularly foreign intelligence agencies.”

The first report shows that Epstein was instrumental in helping Barak develop a formal security agreement between Israel and Mongolia, recruiting powerful friends like Larry Summers, who served as an economist to former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to serve on a Presidential Advisory Board for the Central Asian nation’s economy.

Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties.

Another report shows how Epstein helped Israel to establish a covert backchannel with the Russian government at the height of the Syrian Civil War, during which they attempted to persuade the Kremlin to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a major national security priority for Israel, which had become substantially involved in the conflict.

This process was coordinated with Israeli intelligence and resulted in Barak securing a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one message, Barak explicitly thanked Epstein for “setting the whole thing together.”

Epstein also worked alongside Barak to sell Israeli surveillance tech, which had previously been used extensively in occupied Palestine, to the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire.

In 2014, the pair architected a deal by which the nation’s government, led by President Alassane Ouattara, purchased technology used to listen in on phone calls and radio transmissions and monitor points of interest like cybercafes.

In the decade since, the report says, “Ouattara has tightened his grip on power, banning public demonstrations and arresting peaceful protestors,” while “his Israeli-backed police state has squashed civic organizations and silenced critics.”

On Tuesday, just before the House Oversight Committee dropped its latest batch of documents, the series’ latest report revealed that an Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein’s New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Drop Site’s reporting has fueled speculation of the longstanding theory that Epstein may have worked as an agent of Mossad, Israel’s central intelligence agency. Hussain said that the evidence points to the idea that Epstein was not a formal Mossad agent, but was working as an asset to advance its most hawkish foreign policy goals.

He marveled at the fact that throughout each of these stories, “it’s not Epstein chasing Barak—it’s Barak chasing Epstein,” and that at times, “it looked like Mossad was working for Epstein instead of Epstein working for Mossad.”

In a foreword to their latest report, Hussain and co-author Ryan Grim expressed bewilderment at the lack of media attention paid to the publicly available files revealing Epstein’s role as a semi-official node in Israel’s intelligence apparatus.

While Epstein’s relationship with Trump has routinely been front-page news for many outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have not published a story focused on Epstein’s role in Israeli intelligence.

“We’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents,” the reporters asked. “A question for editors reading this newsletter: What are you doing?”

In the interview, Hussain said he and Grim “are going to continue drilling down on this and not shying away from the political implications of his activities.”

Netflix faces calls for a boycott after it removed its “Palestinian Stories” collection this October. This includes approximately 24 films.

Netflix cited the expiration of three-year licences as the reason for pulling the films from the collection.

Nonetheless, some viewers were outraged and almost 12,000 people signed a CodePink petition calling on Netflix to reinstate the films.

At a time when Palestinians are facing what scholars, United Nations experts and Amnesty International are calling a genocide, Netflix’s move could be seen as a silencing of Palestinian narratives.

The disappearance of these films from Netflix in this moment has deeper implications. The removal of almost all films in this category represents a significant act of cultural erasure and anti-Palestinian racism.

There is a long history of the erasure of Palestine.

Cultural erasure

Book cover: ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Ilan Pappe, professor of history at the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. (Simon & Schuster)

Since the Nakba of 1948, Zionist militias have systematically ethnically cleansed Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of cities, towns and villages, while also targeting Palestinian culture.

Palestinian visual archives and books were looted, stolen and hidden away in Israeli-controlled state archives, classified and often kept under restricted access. This targeting of visual culture is not incidental. It is a calculated act of cultural erasure aimed at severing the connection between a people, their land and history.

Another notable instance of cultural erasure includes the thefts of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) visual archives and cinematic materials. In 1982, the PLO Arts and Culture Section, Research Centre and other PLO offices were looted during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Palestinian Cinema Institutions film archives were moved during the invasion and later disappeared. Theft and looting also occured during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s and recurrent bombardments of Gaza.

This plundering of Palestinian cultural institutions, archives and libraries resulted in the loss of invaluable cultural materials, including visual archives.

To maintain Zionist colonial mythologies about the establishment of Israel, the state systematically stole, destroyed and holds captive Palestinian films and other historical and cultural materials.

Palestinian liberation cinema

By the mid-20th century, Palestinian cinema emerged as a vital component of global Third Worldism, a unifying global ideology and philosophy of anticolonial solidarity and liberation.

Palestinian cinema aligned with revolutionary filmmakers and cinema groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America, all seeking to reclaim their histories, culture and identity in the face of imperial domination.

This photo is taken by Hani Jawharieh, a Palestinian filmmaker who was killed in 1976 while filming in the Aintoura Mountains of Lebanon. CC BY

The PLO’s revolutionary films of the 1960s and 1970s were driven by the national liberation struggle and the desire to document the Palestinian revolution. Created as part of a broader campaign against colonialism and imperialism, PLO filmmakers aimed to rally international solidarity for the Palestinian cause through Afro-Asian, Tricontinental and socialist cultural networks.

Censorship

Censorship became one of the primary mechanisms for repressing cultural production in the Third World. Colonial and imperial powers, as well as allied governments, banned films, books, periodicals, newspapers and art that conveyed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments. Their films and cultural works were denied distribution in western and local markets.

Settler colonial states such as Israel rely on the destruction and suppression of the colonized narratives to erase historical and cultural connections to land. By doing so, they undermine Indigenous Palestinian claims to sovereignty and self-determination.

Many Palestinian cultural workers including writers, poets and filmmakers were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, assassinated and killed.

In an essay about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the late Palestinian American literature professor, Edward Said, explained how the West systematically denies Palestinians the agency to tell their own stories. He said the West’s biased coverage and suppression of Palestinian narratives distorts the region’s history and justifies Israeli aggression. For a more truthful understanding of history, Palestinians needed the right “to narrate,” he said.

Resistance

Despite the denial to narrate, generations of Palestinian filmmakers, including Elia Suleiman, Michel Khleifi, Mai Masri, Annemarie Jacir and many others, have contributed to and evolved this cinematic tradition of resistance.

Their films centre the lived experiences of Palestinians under settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid and exile.

By capturing the Palestinian struggle, freedom dreams, joy, hopes and humour, they help to humanize a population.

A scene from TIFF selection, Farha, about a girl trying to pursue her education in 1948 Palestine just before the Nakba.

After Netflix first launched the Palestinian Stories collection in 2021, the company was criticized by the Zionist organization, Im Tirtzu. They pressured Netflix to purge Palestinian films.

A year later, Netflix faced more pushback — this time from Israeli officials — when it released Farha, a film set against the backdrop of the 1948 Nakba. Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman even took steps to revoke state funding from theatres that screened the film.

The Israeli television series Fauda, produced by former IDF soldiers Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, remains on the platform. Fauda portrays an undercover Israeli military unit operating in the West Bank. The series has faced significant criticism for perpetuating racist stereotypes, glorifying Israeli military actions, and whitewashing the Israeli occupation and systemic oppression of Palestinians.

Such media helps to legitimize and normalize violent actions committed against Palestinians.

Suppression in the time of genocide

In a time of genocide, Palestinian stories, films, cultural production, media and visual culture transcend being mere cultural artifacts. They are tools of defiance, sumud (steadfastness), historical memory, documentation and preservation against erasure. They assert the fundamental right to Palestinian liberation and the right to narrate and exist even while being annihilated.

As such, in the past 400+ days, Israel has intensified its systematic silencing and erasure of Palestinian narratives.

One hundred thirty-seven journalists and media workers have been killed across the occupied Palestinian Territories and Lebanon since Israel declared war on Hamas following its Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on Oct. 7, 2023. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there are almost no professional journalists left in northern Gaza to document Israel’s ethnic cleansing. It has been the deadliest period for journalists in the world since CPJ began collecting data in 1992.

Israel has also targeted, detained, tortured, raped and killed academics, students, health-care workers and cultural workers; many who have shared eyewitness accounts and narrated their stories of genocide on social media platforms.

Israel has censored and silenced Palestinian narratives through media manipulation, digital censorship and the destruction of journalistic infrastructure. Palestinian cultural and academic institutions, cultural heritage and archives have also been bombed and destroyed in Gaza, termed scholasticide. The aim of this destruction is to obliterate historical memory, and suppress documentation of atrocities.

The genocide and scholasticide will prevent the Palestinian people’s ability to fully preserve centuries of history, knowledge, culture and archives.

Netflix’s decision to remove the Palestinian Stories collection and not renew the licences of the films during this time makes it complicit in the erasure of Palestinian culture.

Chandni Desai, Assistant professor, Education, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.