Pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University 
 

Incidents of blatant Jew-hatred and the indifference, if not outright encouragement, of such outrages from some European governments have mounted in recent weeks. The egregious treatment of a group of French Jewish students, when the Spanish airline Vueling ejected them from a plane and arrested their instructor because they were singing in Hebrew, represents just the latest instance in which Diaspora Jews and Israelis have been singled out and mistreated.

Oscar Puente, Spain’s Minister of Transport and a member of that country’s Socialist Workers Party, added insult to injury by subsequently defending Vueling’s offensive actions and referring to the French kids who had been treated abusively as “Israeli brats.” That made it clear, at least as far as Spain is concerned, that discrimination against Jews is now not only officially sanctioned but is also seen as a good way to curry favor with voters.

A post-Oct. 7 crisis

While some disingenuously claim that what we are witnessing is an understandable reaction to suffering in Gaza and is merely “criticism” of Israel, the list of occurrences in which those who are identified as Jewish are subjected to abuse and discrimination is now too numerous to deny that what the world is witnessing has become a crisis. Since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that took place that dark day, Jew-hatred is not merely back in fashion. There is no denying that it has been sanctioned by the intellectual, academic, legal and cultural establishments across the globe, which now regard anti-Zionism as a legitimate, even enlightened point of view, even though it is a prejudicial idea that denies rights to Jews—rights denied to no one else.

While there are places in Europe, such as Hungary or the Czech Republic, where this is not the case, such countries are few and far between, and are the exceptions that are proving the rule. The blood libels of Hamas propaganda that falsely claim that Israel is purposely starving the residents of Gaza and committing “genocide” haven’t merely been mainstreamed; they are now viewed as unquestioned truth, and seen as justifying statements and actions in which Jews are viewed negatively and, as a result, increasingly mistreated.

While antisemitism has surged throughout the United States these last 22 months as well, it would be a mistake to think that the situation is no different than everywhere else in the Jewish Diaspora.

Recent actions undertaken by the U.S. government to combat such hatred and bigotry not only show that President Donald Trump is sincere in his dedication to this battle. It also proves that American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from the rest of the world—is alive and well, despite ongoing efforts from woke leftists who seek to tear it down along with the rest of the Western canon.

A defeat for progressives

The most recent evidence came with the news this past week that Columbia University had settled a dispute with the U.S. government over its toleration and encouragement of antisemitism since Oct. 7. The terms of the deal are not as far-reaching as Trump’s original demands, which had called for its Middle East studies department to be put into “receivership.” Still, it signals a defeat for progressives, whose “long march” through American institutions in recent decades had allowed it to seize control of the country’s education system.

The university will pay a $221 million fine and agree to institute a far-reaching set of reforms aimed at scrapping the way its acceptance of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion had institutionalized race-based policies that enabled campus antisemitism. These results exemplify that Trump made a major Ivy League school bow to his will after a vile surge of anti-Israel protests and pro-Hamas encampments post-Oct. 7 that targeted students and faculty. He has demonstrated that even as an anti-Israel and antisemitic movement has gained strength and momentum elsewhere, it is being beaten in the United States.

That’s not just because the Columbia settlement also raises the pressure on Harvard University, an even more important target of Trump’s campaign against academia, to choose to surrender rather than carry on as the standard-bearer of the left’s “resistance” to the president. Rather, it sends a clear signal to the world that even as the bizarre red-green alliance that has united around the cause of anti-Zionism—stigmatizing Israelis and American Jews as pariahs to be shunned and hounded by global elites—the same ideas are in retreat in the United States.

Still, the fight against the left’s war on the canon of Western civilization and American exceptionalism remains far from over. The situation at Columbia in the coming years will require close government scrutiny since the school’s leadership will no doubt do everything it can to evade the terms of the deal it signed to continue the reign of DEI and to enable its almost uniformly leftist faculty to continue indoctrination in toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. Indeed, some liberals are proclaiming the agreement as a bargain in which it can save the $1.3 billion in federal funding that Trump had threatened to withhold had it not settled at the cost of $221 million and a raft of promises that could be undone by a policy of subtle non-compliance rather than open resistance.

DEI enabled antisemitism

Trump’s determination to take this issue seriously and stick with it should not be doubted.

The Columbia deal isn’t merely a template that a host of other major universities, both public and private, will be forced to accept lest they lose the fortune in government aid that enables them to thrive. It is merely the start of a wide-ranging offensive the administration is waging to roll back the woke tide that allowed far-left ideologies to take over American education. That includes not only the abolition of DEI and other ideological forms of racism but also restrictions on the acceptance of a flood of foreign students, which has played a significant role in the way schools have become a stronghold of antisemitism in recent years, as well as a mainstay of many of the fiscal bases of these schools.

While Jew-hatred is the issue on which the administration’s efforts to reform higher education have hinged, it isn’t the sole focus of this debate. What the administration recognizes—and what some mainstream Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have failed to grasp—the abuses and outrages that have occurred on college campuses since Oct. 7 were only made possible by the way progressives had previously seized control of these institutions.

Pro-Hamas propagandists have been remarkably successful in labeling the victims of Oct. 7 as somehow the villains of the war the terrorists started, rather than a democracy fighting for its existence against Islamists who wish to destroy the sole Jewish state on the planet. The way so many students and faculty swallowed such fiction was a result of their having already been indoctrinated to mistakenly believe that Jews and Israel were “white” oppressors who were always in the wrong, and their Palestinian foes “people of color” always in the right.

The only path to ridding academia of antisemitism lies in forcing these schools to give up leftist ideology that enables the kind of illegal discrimination for which Columbia has now finally agreed to give up.

Elections have consequences

It is merely stating the obvious that this wouldn’t have happened had Trump not beaten Vice President Kamala Harris last November. The administration of President Joe Biden had made DEI the law of the land via executive orders, forcing every government department and agency to adopt its own version of this discriminatory idea and name a woke commissar to enforce it in the same way that so many colleges, arts organizations and corporations had already done. Yet as former President Barack Obama was fond of saying during his time in office, “elections have consequences.” And one of the primary consequences of the 2024 presidential election has been Trump’s determination to roll back Biden’s DEI rules that made a mockery of his claim to oppose antisemitism, as well as made the wave of Jew-hatred after Oct. 7 so widespread and troubling.

During the Biden years, DEI and the discrimination against Jews that is integral to it had seemed to be so pervasive and entrenched within the academy and American culture as to be impossible to resist. But as some of us were pointing out last year, all it would take to accomplish that seemingly impossible feat was an administration that would task officials with enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibitions against racial discrimination and antisemitism. That is exactly what Trump has done. Though some may decry the indiscriminate nature of his efforts to defund schools like Harvard and Columbia, the message those threats have sent to every institution nationwide has been loud and clear. The reign of DEI and its impact on hiring, admissions, programming and curricula that led to the post-Oct. 7 surge in hatred and even violence is now being rolled up like a cheap carpet across the landscape of American institutions.

That is also having an impact on the willingness of so many of these same entities to embrace the false idea that America is an irredeemably racist country, something that was popularized by The New York Times’ fraudulent “1619 Project.” The idea of American exceptionalism was a primary target of that effort. This anti-American and antisemitic concept is still influential throughout the educational system, as teachers’ unions promote that and other toxic leftist theories. Its adherents are also positioned to continue spreading it via legacy media like The Times. But now that the government has shown that it is serious about using the leverage of federal funding to get rid of it, its days are numbered.

An exceptional republic

American exceptionalism is an idea that has gone out of fashion on the left, especially among those who dominate the education system, cultural institutions and the media. It centers on the notion that the republic founded in 1776 is unique among democracies, let alone the world as a whole. Its devotion to individual liberty, as well as political and economic freedom, is the primary reason why the United States has become the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation. Yet to assert this patently obvious fact is now seen as reactionary and chauvinistic. It has come under assault because of the conviction on the left that racism is the primary characteristic of the country’s political culture and the core principle of its historical development.

These claims are false, not just due to historical fact. Despite the original sin of tolerating slavery and the persistence of racism, the arc of the narrative of the American past has always bent toward the expansion of liberty and the rights of all people. This is self-evident not merely because slavery was abolished as a result of a bloody war fought by Americans but because of the enormous progress toward that has been made in the last 60 years as the nation embraced racial equality and even elected a black man twice as its president.

It is also made obvious by the American Jewish experience.

No Diaspora community has ever enjoyed such acceptance or achieved such influence. That was made possible not just by the sometimes fleeting tolerance of the non-Jewish majority. It was the case in other places where Jews experienced “golden ages” that often quickly turned into nightmares, such as in Spain, where intolerance and anti-Jewish discrimination on the part of Muslims alternated with eliminationist hatred from Christians. In the United States, Jews are equal not just because of rights enshrined in the Constitution. That status is also a function of American political culture—first fully articulated by the country’s first president, George Washington, in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I., when he proclaimed that Jews were fully equal and that the government of the United States gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The battle for American exceptionalism is ongoing. Yet contrary to the expectations of the left and the fears of conservatives, it isn’t lost. Not nearly so. Thanks to the administration’s dogged resolve that brought Columbia to heel, it’s likely to be won. And as long as that is so, Israel and the Jewish people will not be left alone to fight back against the tsunami of antisemitism that has swept across the globe.