by Susan Van Gelder
On March 7, once again a task force created by Trump’s executive order has cut $400 million in grants from Columbia University and is “reviewing” its remaining $5 billion in federal funds. And once again, this unprecedented action—or even a threat—ignores procedures mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Title VI.
The antisemitism task force (Justice, Health and Human Services, Education and General Services) accuses Columbia of continued failure to protect Jewish students at Columbia “from antisemitic harassment.” Other reports accuse the university of denying Jewish students learning opportunities, because they feared to enter the New York campus during “pro-Palestinian” protests and encampments last spring.
OUTRAGEOUS AND ILLEGAL ARREST
People gather outside the Manhattan federal court in support of activist Mahmoud Khalil. Photo: FMT, CC BY 4.0
The next day U.S. legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Columbia protests, was arrested by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who brought no warrants or charges. They told Khalil his student visa was revoked. When he informed them he had a green card they told him the State Department “revoked that too.” Then the Department of Homeland Security removed him from his family and legal counsel to an ICE facility in Louisiana. U.S. District Court Judge Jesse Furman blocked his deportation for now but the government has requested a transfer of the case to a court in Louisiana, where a Trump-appointed judge would take over.
Since last spring’s campus protests, over 3,500 students have been arrested and universities are enacting new rules for student surveillance, increasing campus collaboration with law enforcement and suppressing dissent.
Media reports and commentary overwhelmingly call the student encampments and protests “antisemitic.” The New York Times on March 8 added only a mild aside: “schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many…participants were themselves Jewish.” The statement that “schools have pushed back strongly” seems odd in view of the numerous university rulings nationwide to quell dissent and punish students.
U.S. Zionist organizations have successfully pressured mainstream media to accept their definition of antisemitism to include any protests against the state of Israel. At Columbia the movement demanded the University divest of its Israeli investment funds. This was part of a worldwide protest against Israel’s abuse of its Palestinian population, which began years before Israel waged a genocidal war in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 murderous terror attack. The fact that some protesters praised Hamas and a few expressed threats to Jews does not change the universal disgust of so many there and in the country as a whole against the actions of the Israeli state.
CRITIQUE OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT IS NOT ANTISEMITISM
However, the “official” definition of antisemitism pushed by powerful American Zionist organizations, conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, or prejudice and hate against Jewish people.
For its own reasons the Trump Administration has based its approach on the anti-university political rhetoric of Max Eden and Christopher Rufo. President Emeritus of Macalester University Brian Rosenberg writes of “the sudden care for Jews professed by people wholly comfortable with white supremacists and neo-Nazis but shocked beyond words by the actions of campus protesters.” He further asserts that this is not about Columbia, antisemitism, free speech or education. “I hope the university’s leadership will recognize that the goal of these actions is not compliance but destruction…other institutions…might want to think carefully about their self-protective stance in the face of a government that covets the unchecked power of authoritarianism.”
As for lost learning opportunities, there were many more than complaining students realized. What if they had stopped to ask the protesters why they were there? Or joined discussions on the real meanings and history of antisemitism and Islamophobia? Why were other Jewish students participating? What history could have made Palestinian and Arab students so angry that some looked to Hamas for solutions? What was happening in real time in Gaza and the West Bank? If the protests were only about hatred, how and why did protesters hold an interfaith Passover seder in the encampment? These were the real lost learning opportunities.