An executive order to deporting pro-Hamas student visa holders horrifies left-wingers. Would they defend foreigners inciting against other minorities?
Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)
Left-wingers are great believers in academic freedom but only under certain conditions. And it is those conditions that are defining the debate about President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13899 on combating antisemitism in the United States. Issued last week amid a blizzard of other orders and Trump policy changes that have left his foes dazed, this one didn’t get the attention his other actions received. It mandates that all federal departments and agencies will review and report to the White House every possible criminal and civil action that they can take against “unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Rather than content itself with virtue-signaling on the issue and the meaningless platitudes that defined the Biden administration’s “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” Trump’s order cuts straight to the heart of the matter. It is specifically focused on the most prevalent example of antisemitic harassment and violence in contemporary America: the surge of Jew-hatred and pro-Hamas agitation on college campuses since the massacre of 1,200 men, women and children in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
As a White House statement put it, the goal is “to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” The president is explicit on this point: “The order demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.”
And to show that this administration means business when it comes to applying the full power of the federal government to the problem, the U.S. Department of Justice formed a multi-agency task force to do just that.
Defending pro-Hamas agitation
All of this probably sounds reasonable to most observers, including many who may otherwise detest Trump and lament most of what he is doing to transform the federal government in accordance with his campaign promises. But to the American left, the notion of cracking down on hatred on campuses—and deporting those who have used their student visas as licenses to engage in pro-Hamas agitation that targets Jewish students for intimidation and violence—seems to touch on a sore point. They think it isn’t just wrong but nothing less than tyranny. For them, holding accountable those who have incited and taken a leading part in spreading the epidemic of Jew-hatred that has spread across the country in the last 16 months is among the most overt signs of what they believe is the onset of Trumpian tyranny.
This goes beyond their knee-jerk opposition to everything the 47th president does. They both deny that left-wing antisemitism is a form of Jew-hatred and believe that anything done to prevent the targeting of Jews obstructs their efforts to demonize Israel and mark out its supporters for isolation is inherently wrong.
According to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the real problem on campuses since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel triggered a wave of antisemitic protests is not the free pass administrators gave to most of them. It’s the fact that in some instances, universities and colleges sought to hold those who took part in the pro-Hamas agitation accountable for violating the rules of their schools, which forbid them from holding unauthorized demonstrations, occupying buildings as well as creating hostile atmospheres for Jews.
Keeping campus antisemites safe
That was a sentiment echoed in Slate magazine, which declared the executive order on antisemitism to be a “threat to every American.” The same piece declared that Democrats like former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “failed college students last year.” They did that by being insufficiently supportive of their attacks on Jews and the Jewish state, instead of merely extolling them, as Harris did, “showing exactly what human emotion should be.” In effect, the leaders of the Democrats treated campus antisemites as “very fine people” in the same way that they falsely accused Trump of treating neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
The increasingly anti-Israel PEN America, a group supposedly dedicated to defending free speech, declared a crackdown on antisemitism to be a new “McCarthyism.”
The influential left-wing think tank the Center for American Progress accused Trump of “weaponizing antisemitism for political gain.” They said, “It’s clear that Trump’s real goal is to silence opposing voices, whether they be from pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses or Black Lives Matter marchers.” It’s significant that these two sectors, which have overtly aligned themselves with antisemitic views and actions, are far from models of “peaceful protesters.”
The New York Times’ anti-Zionist columnist Michelle Goldberg claims that Trump’s purpose is to “crush the academia left.” By that, she means it’s an effort to stop federal funding for academics whose goal is to attack America and to mendaciously label Israel as a “settler-colonial” and “apartheid” state. Why should people who promote such inherently antisemitic ideas be supported by a government that is obligated to prohibit prejudice against Jews?
That same disingenuous talking point was echoed in the increasingly anti-Zionist, left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where one writer lamented that what Trump was doing was creating “an authoritarian army of informers targeting Muslims, foreign students and the left under the guise of combating hate.”
Some of the criticism of Trump is pure gaslighting.
For example, the openly antisemitic Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which was originally founded as a political front group for fundraisers for Hamas terrorists, told the AP that “the action is discriminatory and wrongly characterizes protesters as ‘pro-jihadist’ or ‘pro-Hamas’” when, of course, the mobs on campuses and in the streets of major cities usually make no pretense of being anything else but that.
Much like the debate about Trump’s 2019 executive order on campus antisemitism, his far more serious approach this time is something of a test for those who comment about it. At that time, his opponents deplored the very idea of classifying Jews as a minority deserving of protection under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with some twisting themselves into figurative pretzels to characterize efforts to deter antisemitism as itself antisemitic. Some Jews who took that absurd line proved that their Trump derangement syndrome was far stronger than any revulsion they might feel about Jew-haters.
Advocating for Jewish genocide
But five and a half years later, and after the horror of Oct. 7, it’s now clear that those who oppose efforts to fight antisemitism aren’t just driven off the deep end by Trump’s presence in the White House. They are now also telling us that they think those chanting for the genocide of Jews (“from the river to the sea”) and terrorism (“globalize the intifada”) are the good guys and not vile supporters of the war to wipe the one Jewish state on the planet off the map.
Their stands are the logical conclusions to be drawn from fashionable left-wing ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality, which falsely label Israel and the Jews as “white” oppressors of people of color, even though the conflict with the Palestinians isn’t about race.
It isn’t about color either, since the majority of Israeli residents come from families of Middle Eastern backgrounds who were forced out of Arab countries. That leads us to understand just how hypocritical those claiming to oppose Trump’s order to defend free speech and academic freedom truly are.
The pro-Hamas left is all in favor of academic freedom when it comes to defending their freedom to indoctrinate students in the new secular religion of neo-Marxist thinking, as well as hatred of Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism. And, as we’ve seen in numerous examples in recent years, when it comes to defending the rights of students and even professors to oppose those toxic ideas, including the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), they think academic freedom is not an issue.
Left-wing hypocrisy
Indeed, when conservative law professor Amy Wax was suspended by the University of Pennsylvania for being too candid about her opinions, which were deliberately mischaracterized as “racist,” there was no groundswell of support on the left or in corporate liberal media. On the contrary, left-wingers think it entirely appropriate to silence those who disagree with them about woke ideology.
It is not a coincidence that the Ivy League school is, of course, one of those whose presidents testified before Congress in December 2023 that it depended on the “context” as to whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews would violate administrative rules.
We all know that if any student, professor or member of a college staff advocated for the lynching of African-Americans, Hispanics or any other DEI-approved minority (a category from which Jews are pointedly excluded) or some other openly racist cause, they would be expelled or fired with few questions asked. Speakers deemed “racist”—which, in practice, usually just means critical of woke ideology—are routinely shouted down or disinvited. And if foreigners used their student visas to advocate for attacks on blacks or Hispanics or Asians, there would be no rush to the barricades to decry their being deported.
A definition of academic freedom that only applies to those who hate Jews and Israel makes a mockery of the concept. The same applies to those who are angry about the Trump administration’s acceptance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism because it correctly notes that those who wish to deny rights to Jews not denied to anyone else are antisemitic. Anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism.
The Biden administration accepted the IHRA definition but did nothing to back it up. Trump is working to correct that mistake.
To their credit, liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee endorsed Trump’s executive order, although both included caveats about not violating anyone’s free speech.
But what’s at stake here is not freedom of speech.
Protecting Jews, not Jew-haters
Anyone can say what they like about the Israeli government and its policies. However, advocacy for terrorism against Jews that results in actions in which they are deliberately targeted for violence crosses the line from speech into discriminatory and illegal conduct. Seeking to target those groups that participate in such actions and to defund institutions that get taxpayer money that are facilitating it is neither tyrannical nor McCarthyism. It’s using the power of the law to protect those who are being attacked for being Jewish.
More to the point, foreign students are only here by permission and as long as they demonstrate good conduct. Deporting Hamas supporters is an appropriate and legal measure that rightly punishes those who take advantage of American generosity while taking part in immoral activities. Would we treat members of the Nazi Party or supporters of any other racist or totalitarian movement any differently? If not, then why the sympathy and the rush to support antisemites and Hamas supporters?
Decent people—whether Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, Jews or non-Jews—should be applauding the seriousness of Trump’s stand on antisemitism. Those who stand against it may pretend that they are merely defending the right to express an opinion, which is the height of disingenuousness. The argument about Trump’s executive order isn’t about academic freedom, free speech or opposing tyranny. It’s about an effort to make America safe for left-wing and Islamist antisemites and to treat them as especially worthy of the government’s protection, as opposed to the Jews they intend to victimize.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
Image: A tent encampment supporting Hamas and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on the quad of San Francisco State University, May 3, 2024. Credit: Mariwlqs via Wikimedia Commons.
