WASHINGTON: American Jews who fled their Syrian homeland decades ago went to the White House this week to appeal to the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Syria that they say are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding the country’s decimated Jewish community.
For Henry Hamra, who fled Damascus as a teenager with his family in the 1990s, the 30 years since have been shadowed by worry for what they left behind.
“I was just on the lookout the whole time. The old synagogues, the old cemetery, what’s going on, who’s taking care of it?’ said Hamra, whose family has settled in New York.
His family fled the Syrian capital to escape the repressive government of Hafez Assad. With the toppling of his son, Bashar Assad, in December and the end of Assad family rule, Hamra, his 77-year-old father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, and a small group of other Jews and non-Jews returned to Syria last month for the first time.
They briefed State Department officials for the region last week and officials at the White House on Wednesday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
They were accompanied by Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of a group called the Syrian American Task Force, who was influential in the past in moving US officials to sanction the Assad government over its institutionalized torture and killings.
With Assad gone and the country trying to move out of poverty, Moustafa has been urging US policymakers to lift sweeping sanctions that block most investment and business dealings in Syria.
“If you want a stable and safe Syria ... even if it’s as simple as rebuilding the oldest synagogue in the world, the only person that’s able to make that a reality today is, frankly, Donald Trump,” Moustafa said.
Syria’s Jewish community is one of the world’s oldest, dating its history back to the prophet Elijah’s time in Damascus nearly 3,000 years ago. It once had been one of the world’s largest, and was still estimated at 100,000 at the start of the 20th century.
Increased restrictions, surveillance and tensions after the creation of Israel and under the authoritarian Assad family sent tens of thousands fleeing in the 1990s. Today, only seven Jews are known to remain in Damascus, most of them elderly.
What began as a largely peaceful uprising against the Assad family in 2011 grew into a vicious civil war, with a half-million dying as Russia and Iranian-backed militias fought to keep the Assads in power, and the Daesh group imposing its rule on a wide swath of the country.
A US-led military coalition routed the Islamic State by 2019. Successive US administrations piled sanctions on Syria over the Assad government’s torture, imprisonment and killing of perceived opponents.
Bashar Assad was ousted in December by a coalition of rebel groups led by an Islamist insurgent, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who today leads what he says is a transition government. He and his supporters have taken pains to safeguard members of Syria’s many minority religious groups and pledged peaceful coexistence as they ask a skeptical international community to lift the crippling sanctions.
Although incidents of revenge and collective punishment have been far less widespread than expected, many in Syria’s minority communities — including Kurds, Christians, Druze and members of Assad’s Alawite sect — are concerned and not convinced by promises of inclusive government.
After the decades away, Yusuf Hamra’s former Christian neighbors in the old city of Damascus recognized him on his trip back last month and stopped to embrace him, and share gossip on old acquaintances. The Hamras prayed in the long-neglected Al-Franj synagogue, where he used to serve as a rabbi.
His son, Henry Hamra, said he was shocked to see tiny children begging in the streets — a result, he said, of the sanctions.
Visiting the site of what had been Syria’s oldest synagogue of all, in the Jobar area of Damascus, Hamra found it in ruins from the war, with an ordnance shell still among the rubble.
Hamra had become acquainted with Moustafa, then a US-based opposition activist, when he reached out to him during the war to see if he could do anything to rescue precious artifacts inside the Jobar synagogue as fighting raged around it.
A member of Moustafa’s group suffered a shrapnel wound trying, and a member of a Jobar neighborhood council was killed. Both men were Muslim. Despite their effort, fighting later destroyed most of the structure.
Hamra said Jews abroad want to be allowed to help restore their synagogues, their family homes and their schools in the capital’s old city. Someday, he says, Syria’s Jewish community could be like Morocco’s, thriving in a Muslim country again.
“My main goal is not to see my Jewish quarter, and my school, and my synagogue and everything fall apart,” Hamra said.
American Jews who fled Syria ask White House to lift sanctions so they can rebuild in Damascus
https://arab.news/8mqps
American Jews who fled Syria ask White House to lift sanctions so they can rebuild in Damascus
- They say the sanctions are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding Syria’s decimated Jewish community
- Members of the Hamra family, who fled Damascus in the 1990s, returned to Syria last month for the first time
Prime Minister Carney says Trump’s trade war will lead to lower trade barriers within Canada
- Carney has set a goal of free trade within the country’s 10 provinces and three territories. Canada has long had interprovincial trade barriers
- Trump’s trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st state have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in Canadian nationalism
TORONTO: Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday eliminating trade barriers within Canada would benefit Canadians far more than US President Donald Trump can ever take away with his trade war as he made his case to retain power at the last debate ahead of the April 28 vote.
Carney has set a goal of free trade within the country’s 10 provinces and three territories by July 1. Canada has long had interprovincial trade barriers.
“We can give ourselves far more than Donald Trump can ever take away,” Carney said “We can have one economy. This is within our grasp.”
Carney said the relationship Canada has had with the US for the past 40 years has fundamentally changed because of Trump’s tariffs. If reelected Carney plans to immediately enter into trade walks with the Trump administration.
Trump’s trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st state have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in Canadian nationalism that has bolstered Liberal Party poll numbers.
Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is imploring Canadians not to give the Liberals a fourth term. He hoped to make the election a referendum on Justin Trudeau, whose popularity declined toward the end of his decade in power as food and housing prices rose and immigration surged.
But Trump attacked, Trudeau resigned and Carney, a two-time central banker, became Liberal party leader and prime minister last month after a party leadership race.
“It maybe difficult, Mr. Poilievre, you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they are both gone,” Carney said. “I am a very different person than Justin Trudeau.”
Public opinion has changed. In a mid-January poll by Nanos, Liberals trailed the Conservative Party by 47 percent to 20 percent. In the latest Nanos poll released Thursday, the Liberals led by 5 percentage points. The January poll had a margin of error 3.1 points while the latest poll had a 2.7-point margin.
“We can’t afford a fourth Liberal term of rising housing costs,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre accused Carney’s Liberals of being hostile toward Canada’s energy sector and pipelines. He accused the Liberals of weakening the economy and vowed that a Conservative government would repeal “anti-energy laws, red tape and high taxes.”
US Senator Van Hollen says he met wrongly deported man in El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR: Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met Thursday in El Salvador with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Abrego Garcia’s wife “to pass along his message of love.” The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US, saying he would have more details Friday.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.
A spokeswoman for El Salvador’s presidency said she had no further information.
The meeting came hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison Thursday while he was trying to check on Abrego Garcia’s well-being and push for his release.
The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, even as they let other cars go on.
“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.
US President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Abrego Garcia back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return. Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Abrego Garcia’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.
The Maryland senator told reporters Wednesday that he met with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr. Abrego Garcia by driving to the CECOT prison,” Van Hollen said Thursday.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and well-being,” Van Hollen said. He said Abrego Garcia should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.
“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.
While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held. He did not mention Abrego Garcia but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans.”
The fight over Abrego Garcia has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.
Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele extremely popular at home.
Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.” Officials there deny wrongdoing.
University protests blast Trump’s attacks on funding, speech and international students
- Berkeley rally part of planned nationwide protest supporting university independence
- “You cannot appease a tyrant,” emeritus professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich tells Berkeley rally
BERKELEY, California/CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Hundreds of students, faculty and community members on a California campus booed on Thursday as speakers accused the administration of President Donald Trump of undermining American universities, as he questioned whether Harvard and others deserve tax-exempt status.
The protest on the University of California’s Berkeley campus was among events dubbed “Rally for the Right to Learn!” planned across the country.
The administration has rebuked American universities over their handling of pro-Palestinian student protests that roiled campuses from Columbia in New York to Berkeley last year, following the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Trump has called the protests anti-American and antisemitic and accused universities of peddling Marxism and “radical left” ideology. On Thursday, he called Harvard, an institution he criticized repeatedly this week, “a disgrace,” and also criticized others.
Asked about reports the Internal Revenue Service was planning to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status, Trump told reporters at the White House he did not think a final ruling had been made, and indicated other schools were under scrutiny.
Trump had said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called “political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’“
“I’m not involved in it,” he said, saying the matter was being handled by lawyers. “I read about it just like you did, but tax-exempt status, I mean, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege, and it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard.”
“When you take a look whether it’s Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, I don’t know what’s going on, but when you see how badly they’ve acted and in other ways also. So we’ll, we’ll be looking at it very strongly.”
At Berkeley on Thursday, protesters raised signs proclaiming “Education is a public good!” and “Hands off our free speech!” Robert Reich, a public policy professor, compared the responses of Harvard and Columbia to demands from the administration that they take such steps as ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and putting academic departments under outside control.
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter on Monday, rejected such demands as unprecedented “assertions of power, unmoored from the law” that violated constitutional free speech and the Civil Rights Act.
Columbia had earlier agreed to negotiations after the Trump administration said last month it had terminated grants and contracts worth $400 million, mostly for medical and other scientific research. After reading the Harvard president’s letter, Columbia’s interim President Claire Shipman, said her university would continue “good faith discussions” with the administration, but “would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire.”
You cannot appease a tyrant,” said Reich, who served in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet. “Columbia University tried to appease a tyrant. It didn’t work.”
“After Harvard stood up to the tyrant, Columbia, who had been surrendering, stood up and said no.”
Columbia University in New York initially agreed to several demands from the Trump administration. But its acting president took a more defiant tone in a campus message Monday, saying some of the demands “are not subject to negotiation.”
About 150 protesters rallied at Columbia, which had been the scene of huge pro-Palestinian protests last year. They gathered on a plaza outside a building that houses federal offices, holding signs emblazoned with slogans including “stop the war on universities” and “censorship is the weapon of fascists.”
After Harvard’s Garber released his letter on Monday, the Trump administration said it was freezing $2.3 billion in funding to the university. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Wednesday the termination of two DHS grants totaling more than $2.7 million to Harvard and said the university would lose its ability to enroll foreign students if it does not meet demands to share information on some visa holders.
In response, a Harvard spokesperson said the university stood by its earlier statement to “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” while saying it will comply with the law.
CNN was first to report on Wednesday the IRS was making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status and that a final decision was expected soon.
Harvard said there was no legal basis to rescind it, saying such an action will be unprecedented, will diminish its financial aid for students and will lead to abandonment of some critical medical research programs.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to the President’s TRUTH.”
Under federal law the president cannot request that the IRS, which determines whether an organization can have or maintain tax-exempt status, investigate organizations.
Ronald Cox, a professor of political science and international relations at Florida International University in Miami, said during a small event Thursday that the international students are fearful.
“They don’t know if they could be deported, they don’t know if they can be directed to the El Salvadoran prison,” Cox said. “There’s been no due process. It’s kind of open season on the most vulnerable students.”
The protests were organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which includes groups such as Higher Education Labor United and the American Federation of Teachers.
Kelly Benjamin, a spokesperson for American Association of University Professors, said in a phone call that the Trump administration’s goal of eviscerating academia is fundamentally anti-American.
“College campuses have historically been the places where these kind of conversations, these kind of robust debates and dissent take place in the United States,” Benjamin said. “It’s healthy for democracy. And they’re trying to destroy all of that in order to enact their vision and agenda.”
Ukraine, US sign ‘memorandum of intent’ on resources deal: Kyiv
- US officials say boosting American business interests in Ukraine will help deter Russia from future aggression in the event of a ceasefire
KYIV: Ukraine and the United States on Thursday signed a “memorandum of intent” to move forward with a fraught deal for US access to Kyiv’s natural resources and critical minerals, Kyiv said.
“We are happy to announce the signing, with our American partners, of a Memorandum of Intent, which paves the way for an Economic Partnership Agreement and the establishment of the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on X.
Kyiv and Washington had planned to sign a deal on extracting Ukraine’s strategic minerals weeks ago, but a clash between presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in February temporarily derailed work on the agreement.
Trump wants the deal — designed to give the US royalty payments on profits from Ukrainian mining of resources and rare minerals — as compensation for aid given to Ukraine by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Svyrydenko did not publish details of the memorandum, but said work continued toward securing a final agreement.
“We hope that the Fund will become an effective tool for attracting investments in the reconstruction of our country, modernization of infrastructure, support for business, and the creation of new economic opportunities,” she said.
“There is a lot to do, but the current pace and significant progress give reason to expect that the document will be very beneficial for both countries.”
US officials say boosting American business interests in Ukraine will help deter Russia from future aggression in the event of a ceasefire.
Kyiv is pushing for concrete military and security guarantees as part of any deal to halt the three-year war.
Man who hijacked a small plane in Belize and was fatally shot was a US veteran
- The man was shot by a passenger who was licensed to carry a firearm, which he later turned over to police
BELIZE CITY: A US citizen hijacked a small Tropic Air plane in Belize on Thursday at knifepoint, injuring three others before being shot and killed, police said.
The assailant pulled a knife while the plane was in air, demanding the domestic flight take him out of the country, Police Commissioner Chester Williams told journalists.
The hijacker was identified as US citizen Akinyela Sawa Taylor, Williams said, adding that it appeared Taylor was a military veteran.
The plane circled the airspace between northern Belize and capital Belize City as the hijacking was underway, and began to run dangerously low on fuel, the police commissioner said.
Taylor stabbed three people on board, according to Williams, including the pilot and a passenger who shot Taylor with a licensed firearm as the plane landed outside Belize City.
That passenger was rushed to the hospital, as was Taylor, who died from the gunshot wound.
Williams said that it was unclear how Taylor boarded the plane with a knife, though he acknowledged that the country’s smaller airstrips lacked security to fully search passengers.
The attacker had been denied entry to the country over the weekend, according to police. The plane had been due to fly the short route from Corozal near the Mexican border to San Pedro, off the coast. Police said it was unclear how Taylor reached Corozal.
Belizean authorities have reached out to the US embassy in the country for aid in investigating the incident. Luke Martin, public affairs officer for the embassy, told journalists that it had no details on Taylor’s background or motivation so far.
According to information released by the airport, Taylor was a teacher in the United States. He was listed online as previously being a football coach at the McCluer North High School in Florissant, Missouri.
An employee at the school told Reuters that Taylor did not currently work there.
