Trump’s mandate: Defund and deport college antisemites
It is time to confront a corrupt, biased education establishment that is both undermining belief in America and enabling Jew-hatred.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Dec 24, 2024
Trump has vowed to defund schools that have allowed antisemitism to spread and to deport foreign students engaged in pro-Hamas activities.
During the 2024 election campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made it clear that he was going to defund schools that have allowed antisemitism to spread and to deport foreign students engaged in pro-Hamas activities.
Such rhetoric has sometimes been dismissed as typical Trumpian hyperbole. To the extent that he was taken seriously, it was denounced as insensitive, undemocratic, xenophobic and even Islamophobic. Indeed, that remains the position of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the left-wing lobby/talking shop that purports to represent the interests of all Jews and the community relations councils that speak for local Jewish organizations around the country.
As Trump prepares to take office next month, these critics and most of those who claim to speak for Jewish interests continue to speak against such draconian penalties and urge moderation.
Defining ‘moderation’
Maybe the problem, however, is how the chattering classes and others defending the status quo or who advocate for less stringent measures define moderation in this context.
Perhaps the most glaring evidence of how warped the situation on American college campuses has become is the way the liberal establishment defines “moderation” on the issue of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 war on Iranian-backed terror groups.
A feature published in The New York Times this past Sunday centered on the plight of those with a “middle-of-the-road” opinion about Israel and the Palestinians. The paper of record has an interesting definition of moderation. It includes those who think that Israel is committing “genocide,” who believe that leaders of its democratically elected government should be hauled before an international kangaroo court for punishment and who are ambivalent about joining forces with those who think one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.
Those who support the Jewish state’s right to self-defense and think that the self-determination of Jews in Israel is not a subject that should be considered debatable are expressing views in sync with those of the majority of the American people. And they go hand in hand with simple justice. But they were depicted by the Times as morally equivalent to pro-Hamas radicals who harass and attack Jewish students, as well as back the elimination of Israel (“from the river to the sea”) and the genocide of its people (“globalize the intifada”).
American higher education is dominated by leftist ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality. These skewed dogmas are enforced by the dead hand of bureaucracies dedicated to the promotion of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that treats Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors. So, it’s no surprise that these institutions are essentially neutral about antisemitism.
This means that in the view not only of the Times but of most of academia, those who oppose antisemitic activists are damned as extremists. Those who engage in open acts of Jew-hatred are treated as if they have a reasonable point of view that should be heard and is deserving of our respect, rather than the condemnation and punishment they would certainly receive were their bigotry directed against African-Americans or Hispanics.
Slaps on the wrist
As infuriating as that framing of the issue may be, it’s an apt depiction of how the academic establishment understands what has been happening on its watch in the last 15 months. During that time, as acts of antisemitism not only surged to unprecedented levels in the United States, especially on college campuses, those groups, administrators, faculty members and students who have been responsible for this have effectively been mainstreamed.
That is why what is needed now is not more outreach to those who hate Israel and the Jews, or attempts to reason with the institutions that have allowed this to happen on their watch, sometimes with their support.
Nor have complaints to the U.S. Department of Education to ensure that schools receiving federal funds defend the rights of Jewish students under the provisions of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A recent settlement involving five campuses associated with the University of California about the bigotry and discrimination faced by Jewish students was praised by the Jewish groups that brought the complaints and their supporters. The same was true of their reactions to a similar agreement reached between the Department of Education and Occidental College in Los Angeles. These schools avoided any real penalties by promising better behavior in the future. Though there is little reason to believe that the same people who have enabled the current crisis to spread, we are being asked to believe that such toothless measures and slaps on the wrist will be enough to change the culture in academia.
What is needed is decisive action to inflict real pain on the institutions that are essentially ambivalent about Jew-hatred. Though they defend their stands as being moderate and defending academic freedom, their positions are neither—nor do they have anything to do with higher education’s mission to pursue knowledge in an atmosphere of respect and tolerance.
And that’s where the second Trump administration comes in.
The first thing that the president’s new team should do is to divert the question of enforcing Title VI violations from the Department of Education, whose bureaucrats seem to think their job is to ensure the free flow of federal money to institutes of higher learning. Instead, it should be the Department of Justice—with all of the immense legal and police power at its disposal—that should be dealing with the issue. The offending schools should be hauled into federal court, not allowed to engage in negotiations with a bureaucracy that is ill-equipped and often unenthusiastic about addressing the problem of antisemitism.
The process of defunding schools guilty of indifference to antisemitism and engaging in acts of discrimination based on their fealty to DEI rules that are essentially racist, as well as at odds with any notion of equal opportunity for all, won’t be easy. But up until now, there has been no serious attempt by Washington to deal with the problem.
But this is about more than just institutional neglect and tacit compliance. It’s also about the money trail from abroad.
Follow the money
By that, I don’t just mean the way foreign governments like Qatar, which is aligned with Hamas and Iran, as well as other nations, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into American academic institutions. This funding (not all of which is fully disclosed) has helped transform the Middle East studies departments of virtually all universities into hotbeds of anti-Zionism and make it impossible for pro-Israel scholars to get jobs or influence the debate about the issue. The departments, with considerable help from other branches of the humanities where DEI and critical race theory is the new orthodoxy, help to legitimize the hatred of Israel and Jews on campuses.
The other way such antisemitic activism is funded is via the enrollment of foreign students from Muslim and Arab nations. As many as 40,000 students from such nations are currently studying in the United States. While China is, by far, the largest source of foreign students (which is itself a serious concern in an era when the Chinese Communist Party-run government in Beijing, is the chief geostrategic threat to the United States), nations like Saudi Arabia and even Iran—the world’s leading funder of state-sponsored terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department—are both sending more than 10,000 each to the United States.
It is no exaggeration to say that the activities of these foreign students have played a key role in fomenting the intimidation of Jewish students, the normalization of support for terrorism and even violence against Israelis and Jews. Not to mention the routine violation of existing campus rules against illegal demonstrations or occupations of buildings. This element of the student radical population should have been particularly at risk of being expelled and then compelled to leave the United States. Instead, most schools have been at pains to spare them from the consequences of their actions.
Why? The answer is that—like the funding of Middle East Studies and other departments—foreign students are a major source of income for U.S. institutions. Unlike many Americans, those coming from abroad are more likely to pay full tuition rather than getting government or private assistance or benefiting from school scholarships. Getting rid of violent antisemites who break the law while studying in the United States, using student visas, would be a devastating financial blow to many universities.
Indeed, as the BBC reports, many schools are urging foreign students to return to their campuses from winter break before Trump takes office. Among them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose president, Sally Kornbluth, was among those who testified to Congress last year that it would depend on “the context” as to whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews would violate her institution’s rules.
Much of the media coverage on this issue has focused on the anxiety these students are feeling about the possibility of being booted out of the United States, where they enjoy the sort of freedom that they don’t have at home in Muslim and Arab nations. Indeed, one feature by CNN described at length the plight of a graduate student from Gambia named Momodou Taal at Cornell University, who took part in encampments that obstructed the freedom of movement of Jewish students on campus and disrupted job fairs geared for his peers. He was sanctioned by the school for engaging in “unreasonably loud” chants against Israel and the Jews, and “escalating, egregious behavior and a disregard for the university policies.”
Unlike most of those who were part of the antisemitic campus movement, the keffiyeh-clad Taal was suspended by the university and, according to The Cornell Daily Sun, is not able to continue as an instructor of a course called “What is Blackness? Race and Processes of Racialization,” a first-year writing seminar at the Africana Studies and Research Center.
As the CNN article seemed to argue, he deserved sympathy and support for advocating against Israeli “genocide” and the existence of a Jewish state. That notion is dead wrong. Those who come to the United States to engage in antisemitic campaigns, break laws and encourage violence have no right to remain in the country.
A Hamas support network
This is not repression of legitimate political views or an assault on the constitutional right to freedom of speech. As the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther advocates, foreign students who are part of a “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-American “pro-Palestinian movement” aren’t mere political dissenters. They are part of a global Hamas support network whose sole aim is to subvert American efforts to oppose international terrorism. They are in the United States only as long as they obey the law and don’t violate the terms of their visas, which, it is clear, many of them are openly flouting. Yet many Jewish organizations seem unwilling to get behind Heritage’s effort because they see it as part of the think tank’s Project 2025, which was falsely smeared by Democrats as a blueprint for authoritarianism.
Some Zionist organizations are working to build support for Trump fulfilling his vow to deport these students as well as on behalf of congressional efforts to formally revoke the visas of those who engage in the hatred of Jews. Yet others, like the JCPA, are acting to support the haters as part of its general opposition to enforcement of laws against illegal immigration. So is the Nexus Leadership Project, whose primary purpose is to undermine support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which cites anti-Zionism as one of the key indicators of contemporary Jew-hatred. The Anti-Defamation League, whose mission is to defend the Jewish community against antisemites but which has often acted as if its real priority is liberal political activism, has so far remained silent about the issue.
Trump’s law-enforcement team nominees, which include Pam Bondi as attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights and Kash Patel as director of the FBI, have been denounced by liberal opinion as extremists. But what is needed now is not the sort of “moderation” on antisemitism extolled by The New York Times. To the contrary, the trio seems set to fulfill Trump’s promises by cracking down on college antisemitism and deporting foreign antisemites. Those liberal groups that oppose them and the only measures that will make a difference in this crisis have forfeited the right to claim they speak for the interests of the Jewish community or against antisemitism.
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