How Biden fueled a 200% surge in antisemitism

By  Liel Leibovitz (Israel Hayom)

It will be the policy of the United States to fight antisemitism vigorously, and to use all legal means at our disposal to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold accountable those who commit unlawful acts of harassment and violence motivated by antisemitism.

This unequivocal declaration comes from President Donald Trump’s executive order issued earlier this month. The order gives all federal agencies exactly 60 days to propose new and muscular ways to eradicate the meteoric rise in antisemitism in the US. In the year and a half since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the number of antisemitic incidents in the US, according to Anti-Defamation League data, has surged by over 200%, with more than 10,000 cases of harassment, threats, vandalism and outright violence against Jews. Of these, over 2,000 incidents occurred on university campuses – an increase of nearly 500%.

To understand why Trump’s executive order is so important, and what exactly it can do, we must first understand the reality that preceded the election of the 47th president, namely Joe Biden’s years in the White House.

Black and white

 

According to many American commentators, the former vice president’s path to the Oval Office began to be paved more vigorously in the summer of 2020, when a white police officer named Derek Chauvin used unreasonable force, causing the death of a black detainee named George Floyd. Almost overnight, massive riots erupted in thousands of US cities, with dozens killed and over a billion dollars in property damage. The riots were led by members of a relatively new movement called Black Lives Matter, which maintained deliberate ambiguity about its goals, leadership, or any other transparency details expected of a public organization. Members of the movement accused white America of systemic racism and demanded far-reaching changes, chief among them the complete abolition of all police forces whatsoever, under the slogan “Defund the Police.”

As ridiculous as it may seem, the idea gained traction, and between Floyd’s killing in May 2020 and December of that year, Black Lives Matter raised more than $10 billion, including from major corporations and large donors to the Democratic Party. The Democrats, for their part, immediately rallied to the flag, praising the movement and promising to continue promoting its goals.

It didn’t matter that reports from some brave and independent media outlets showed that the movement’s leaders were using the funds mainly to buy themselves luxurious mansions. It didn’t matter that the movement’s official website clashed not only with Jews but also with the institution of the family, which – the movement declared – must be dismantled since every family is oppressive by its very nature, and therefore children should only be raised in communal collectives. It didn’t matter that large cities that implemented the promise to dismantle the police were immediately flooded with unprecedented waves of crime and violence. It also didn’t matter that the narrative that ignited the movement, that of police violence against blacks, was blatantly false:

Since 2015, when the US began collecting precise data on policing, there have been about 10 million arrests per year, and exactly 14 unarmed black people were shot dead by police officers. Each of these cases can be examined individually, and ways can be suggested to reduce shooting of innocents, but it cannot be claimed, as members of Black Lives Matter and their associates in the Democratic Party did, that this is an epidemic of racism and violence.

 

None of the above data particularly interested Joe Biden and his colleagues. The presidential candidate called it a “historic movement for justice” and promised to support it and its goals. He did not lie: on his first day as president, he signed Executive Order 13,985, which promised to allocate significant resources to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Those who supported the president and his policies claimed that this was nothing less than a revolution to finally eradicate the racism that pervades American society. The less enthusiastic, on the other hand, argued that while there is room for improvement, America in 2020 is light years away from that of the 50s or 60s, and that allocating significant resources to fight a problem that is not really noticeable will only cause social upheaval.

Almost overnight, a significant part of American institutions – giant corporations, universities and the federal government itself – aligned with the Biden administration and began to divert significant budgets, partly encouraged by the administration, to DEI. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, announced in 2020 an initiative called Projects for Progress, designed to invest vast resources in everything related to fighting all types of discrimination, real or imagined. Or, more accurately, almost all types of discrimination. “After DEI took hold at Penn, anti-Semitic fervor on campus intensified,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former vice dean of the university’s medical school. In an article in City Journal, Goldfarb explained that all this is no coincidence. “At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed. While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians.”

Danger on campuses

Unfortunately, quite a few data support this assumption. In 2021, for example, Jay Greene, a fellow at the prestigious Heritage Foundation research institute, examined the social media accounts of 750 people holding key positions in DEI departments at 65 American universities, and found not only that almost all of them frequently shared content about Israel – despite the fact that the Jewish state, needless to say, is not supposed to play a significant role in the lives of those whose job definition is to ensure equality on campuses thousands of kilometers away from the Gaza Strip – but also that 96% of all the content they shared about Israel was not only extremely critical but also bordered on antisemitism.

A rare glimpse into the antisemitism of the DEI world was provided by Tabia Lee, a black non-Jewish woman who in 2021 was hired to lead the DEI efforts of De Anza College in Northern California. In an article she wrote for the New York Post after her dismissal in 2023, Lee claimed that she was horrified, when she arrived at the college, to experience an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement and agitation. When she told her colleagues that Jewish students deserve treatment exactly like any other minority group, they replied that this was not true because Jews are Zionists, Zionism is racism and white supremacy, and therefore care should be taken, if Jewish events are allowed to take place at the college at all, that these events focus on Israeli injustices against Palestinians. Lee was appalled and immediately demanded that the college officially condemn antisemitism. The college leadership refused, and after students and colleagues in the DEI department called her derogatory names like “filthy Zionist,” Lee lost her job.

The picture she painted is painful and accurate. Before Biden’s election, antisemitism on campuses was limited to a few. After the Democrats’ return to the White House, every university began establishing DEI departments at a dizzying pace, and staffed them with faculty members who saw hatred of Israel not only as a legitimate opinion but also as a moral duty of anyone who considers themselves a good progressive. This is why so few universities lifted a finger after October 7, when students raised Hamas and Hezbollah flags, set up tents in the heart of the campus, and attacked their Jewish friends: antisemitism in universities was the result of years of built-in policy, not a momentary and surprising outbreak.

 

Just as university presidents turned a blind eye to antisemitism – a blindness that cost some of them, including the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia, their jobs, not to mention vast sums in donations from Jewish supporters – so did the Democrats. At the end of last year, for example, Republican lawmakers on the Congressional Education Committee published a 300-page report on the state of antisemitism in universities. The report summarized a year of interviews with hundreds of people, as well as a thorough examination of 400,000 pages of internal documents at prestigious institutions such as those of the Ivy League. One of the most incriminating findings published in the report was a transcript of a conversation between Minouche Shafik, former president of Columbia University, with David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, the co-chairs of the university’s board of trustees.

Shafik told Greenwald and Shipman about a conversation she had with Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York and the Democratic majority leader in the Senate. Shafik asked Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the US, what he thought the university should do with pro-Hamas students who disrupt studies on campus and harass Jews. And Schumer, as Shafik reported, said the university should do nothing, as antisemitism is a political issue that only interests Republicans. Schumer, of course, denied the report, but it’s hard to imagine why an experienced leader like Shafik would lie about such a matter in an internal conversation with her confidants. And even if the report is not accurate, it cannot be denied that the Biden administration did little, if anything, to ensure the safety of Jewish students on American campuses.

Which brings us back to Trump.

War on DEI

In the first weeks of his second term, Trump declared all-out war on DEI. He not only declared that every federal agency must immediately dismantle all DEI departments established in recent years, but also instructed the federal government to identify and immediately combat all DEI initiatives in the private sector that led to reverse discrimination. Does such discrimination exist? The answer can be inferred from the panic that gripped giant companies like Facebook, Google, Disney, and others, which rushed to immediately dismantle DEI initiatives that just a few months ago boasted hundreds of employees and budgets of millions of dollars. It’s time, the president declared in several interviews, to build an American society “color-blind and based on abilities, not identities.”

And nowhere will this change be felt more prominently than in American universities: at least 240 of them in 36 states have announced, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication that tracks university affairs, the cancellation of all or a significant part of their DEI initiatives. Public universities in North Carolina, for example, announced this week the cancellation of the requirement to take courses dealing with DEI to be eligible for a bachelor’s degree, and the University of Colorado removed the page dealing with DEI from its official website. But many other universities declared war on the president and his policies, and vowed to continue on their path until further notice. The president of Princeton University, for example, Christopher Eisgruber, chose the famous British slogan from World War II – Keep Calm and Carry On – which left no doubt as to who are the good guys here and who are the potential destroyers of democracy. The university, he made clear, will continue with its DEI initiatives until all the lawsuits recently filed against Trump and his presidential orders are resolved in court.

 

But it’s likely that Eisgruber and his fellow travelers will soon have to recalculate their route. The president and his people, explained Asaf Romirowsky, CEO of two influential academic associations – “Scholars for Peace in the Middle East” and “the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa” – are taking campus antisemitism extremely seriously, and intend to use far-reaching measures to ensure that Hamas and Hezbollah supporters face real punishments.

“Trump’s executive order regarding antisemitism,” Romirowsky told Israel Hayom, “makes it very clear which way the wind is blowing. It specifically mentions US immigration laws, which order the immediate deportation of any non-citizen who supports or encourages organizations defined as terrorist organizations.”

Since a significant number of the loudest anti-Jewish activists on campuses are foreign students staying in the US on student visas, Romirowsky explained that it’s likely the administration will demand their immediate deportation. And this, it’s also likely, will put universities in a sensitive position: Columbia, for example, did everything in its power to avoid identifying the students who participated in the antisemitic riots on campus last year, and ordered a brief investigation that was closed after six days claiming it failed to identify any of the students guilty of disturbing the peace. Given the fact that most of the rioters were documented in videos uploaded to social media, the claim is patently ridiculous; but the university administration knows that if it points to names, and students are deported as a result, it will have to deal not only with internal riots but also with a potentially huge loss of income: as of 2023, 56% of Columbia’s students were foreign students, who usually pay full tuition. The university, then, is not eager to do anything that might lead to harming this golden goose.

Through the pocket

Unfortunately for them, Romirowsky explained, Trump has even sharper tools to hit universities’ pockets. “Columbia alone,” he said, “received more than $6 billion from the federal government in the last five years in various grants. If Trump decides not to approve budgets for any academic institution that doesn’t comply with the law, it will mean the loss of vast sums.”

Trump can also significantly affect donations that constitute the bulk of universities’ capital. Columbia, for example, has a treasure chest of about $14.8 billion, managed in various investment funds. During his first term, Trump passed a law that taxed about 1.4% of the investment income of universities whose total endowment exceeds $500,000 per student, which mainly affected large and wealthy universities. Last week, Congressman Mike Lawler, close to Trump, introduced a bill to raise the tax rate on investment income of wealthy universities to 10%.

“Universities need to understand that the president and his people didn’t come to play games,” Romirowsky said. “When violent demonstrators impose terror against Jews on campus, and when there’s no real freedom of expression for anyone who supports Israel, our universities are in danger of turning from acclaimed academic institutions into nests of hatred and violence. The previous administration saw this process happening and encouraged it. The current administration is committed to doing everything to change direction and protect the core values that have made the US and its universities renowned worldwide.”

Romirowsky added that he expects another series of steps from the administration, including real investigations against anyone who refuses to enforce the law and ensure the safety of Jewish students. He also said he hopes to see the administration taking sanctions against Qatar, which has invested $4.7 billion in recent decades in American universities, making the country the largest foreign donor to higher education in the US. Qatari money, Romirowsky explained, very often leads to appointments with extreme antisemitic positions, as well as curricula that present Israel in a distorted and terrible light.

“It’s inconceivable that a country that supports terrorist organizations like Hamas and continues to fund America’s sworn enemies should have such extensive influence on what American students know and think about the world.”

Judging by the output of recent weeks, Trump understands all these threats very well. And unlike his predecessor in office, he takes them seriously.