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By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) At a time when partisanship influences virtually every aspect of American life, we shouldn’t be surprised when even the most anodyne governmental actions are not merely opposed but labeled as authoritarian tyranny. That’s especially true when it comes to anything done by President Donald Trump.
In a saner political era, the administration’s decision to pull funding from Columbia University over its tolerance of Jew-hatred could be understood in its proper context and easily seen as both constitutional and entirely necessary. The same is true of the arrest last week of Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign national who was one of the organizers of the harassment of Jews on Columbia’s campus, by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In 2025, seeking to roll back the damage the far left’s grip on the education system has done to the country and the way it has fueled antisemitism is not merely controversial but depicted by leading liberal news outlets as outright tyranny. These actions are being challenged by many in politics and the media, as well as cited as the latest examples of what they falsely claim is Trump’s push to end democracy and replace it with authoritarian rule.In so doing, they not only validate the party line of supporters of the Hamas terror movement. They also demonstrate that—even though most of American Jewry wish it to be otherwise—since the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, effectively combating antisemitism is no longer a matter of a nonpartisan consensus.
In the 15 months after Oct. 7, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris waffled and spoke out of both sides of their mouths about Israel’s war on Hamas and the related surge of antisemitism in the United States. Fearful of offending their party’s left-wing base, they failed to act decisively against Jew-hatred on university campuses and in the streets of major U.S. cities. As historian and U.S. State Department antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt admitted last week, much of the outrages being committed against Jews were met by administrative “silence,” even as Biden and Harris stated that pro-Hamas collegiate protesters deserved to be hard.
Leading institutions from Columbia University on the East Coast and the University of California, Los Angeles on the West Coast couldn’t be persuaded to change. Their administrations and faculties had long since been captured by leftist ideologues who were determined to impose on their students the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, as well as the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Nor could they be shamed into better behavior as the debacle of the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge, Mass., and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia testifying to Congress in December 2023 that advocacy for genocide against Jews wasn’t against the rules of their schools showed.
The only way to do something about the iron grip that an increasingly antisemitic left-wing intellectual class has on American education was through electing a president who would use the federal government’s power to that end.
It would be far better if punishing schools like Columbia—and the others that rightly fear the same treatment—didn’t generate the sort of knee-jerk opposition that everything Trump says or does. That ought to also be true when it comes to efforts to deport non-citizens who use their legal status to organize support for the genocidal intentions of terrorist groups like Hamas in Gaza and do their best to make life untenable for Jews on college campuses who haven’t abjured their loyalty to their people or faith.
But that’s the situation we find ourselves in. As such, it’s time to recognize that on this issue, the only sort of leader who would have acted along these lines is someone like Trump. Only a president who has contempt for the expert class and credentialed elites of American life would think to use the power of the government to defend Jews in the same way that it has done for decades to protect other minorities, like African Americans or Hispanics, who fall under the DEI rubric.
Ideology is the problem
The problem was not merely one of neglect or university leaders who were easily bullied by pro-Hamas mobs, as so many of them were after Oct. 7 when encampments, building occupations and the harassment of Jewish students became commonplace in so many places. Toleration of these activities was a function of a mindset in which hatred for Israel and Jews was considered not just acceptable but laudable.
That was a function of the pervasive influence of woke ideas in which Israel and Jews are falsely labeled as “white” oppressors who are always in the wrong, no matter what they do. Similarly, those who commit violence against them—like Hamas and the Palestinians who perpetrated the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children on Oct. 7—are always seen as in the right.
Schools were not just unable to control their campuses to stop attacks on Jews. Many academic administrations viewed such activities as the sort of activism that they had sought to encourage, even if they regretted excesses that impacted their ability to maintain order.
Revolts of donors, many of whom are Jewish, who care about antisemitism as well as the damage done to the entire country by woke groupthink is one way to exert pressure on such institutions. As much as that sort of pushback should be encouraged, withholding federal grants and contracts—crucial to all schools and essential to the funding of all but the wealthiest institutions of higher education—is the only path to real change.
Still, we shouldn’t be misled by the arguments of those who are opposing Trump’s actions. The attempt by liberal media outlets like The New York Times, to treat schools like Columbia and thugs like Khalil as victims of government persecution, may fit into the narrative of political liberals about a president they despise. But far from violating established norms as he is so often accused of doing, what Trump is doing is defending the values that all decent people, regardless of their political affiliations or how they feel about him and his other politics, ought to be supporting.
In the case of the U.S. Department of Education pulling Columbia’s grants, arguments pronouncing that this is an attack on higher education itself, academic freedom or free speech—or as Times columnist David French asserted about similar actions undertaken by the administration—don’t hold water. Nor is it part of a broader constitutional crisis brought on by what the left claims are Trump’s unprecedented actions.
As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has pointed out, while the details will be subject to litigation, Trump is well within his rights to act to combat discrimination in his executive orders, as well as to overturn the actions of his predecessors, such as that of President Biden, to put such terrible practices in place.
Moreover, as Turley has also argued, the side in this dispute that seeks to violate free speech and academic freedom were those in the pro-Hamas mobs, egged on by administrations that coddled and enabled them, who were violating the rights of Jewish students and faculty.
The context comes as part of an academic culture in which non-leftist views have been increasingly suppressed via deplatforming and hiring practices that made conservative or pro-Israel professors rare, if not extinct, in most humanities faculties.
In these cases, the question was not one about whether supporters of Hamas and those who did advocate for Jewish genocide (“from the river to the sea”) or terrorism against Jews (“globalize the intifada”) are being deprived of their right to free speech, as those who rationalize or defend them claim. Rather, it was a matter of those who held these views creating an atmosphere on campuses in which it became difficult if not impossible for Jews to pursue their educations or express their views.
It’s equally true that had anyone on campus sought to advocate for violence against protected minorities like blacks or Hispanics, university administrations would have cracked down on them without mercy. By failing to act when it was the rights of Jews that were being violated, institutions didn’t merely fail them; they systematically violated Title VI of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
Efforts to enforce the law via complaints to the Department of Education brought lengthy investigations that never resulted in any real punishment for schools that were determined to hold on to their DEI culture and practices that had made such violations inevitable. So, Trump’s decisions were not only in accordance with the law. They were long overdue.
Pro-Hamas activism and the law
As for efforts to deport Khalil, this, too, is a welcome development.
Khalil, of Palestinian Arab origin, was born in Syria. He worked for the Hamas-linked UNRWA refugee agency before coming to the United States for his graduate education and obtained a green card, which enabled him to stay and find work.
He has every right to believe and say what he likes, even if it is hateful. But non-citizens, even green-card holders, are not entitled to pursue activities that aid terrorist organizations and advance hateful ideologies like antisemitism. And that’s exactly what he did at Columbia as he helped organize the pro-Hamas demonstrations, encampments and occupations of buildings.
The Trump administration will likely face a long legal battle to throw him out of the United States. But to claim—as those who seek Israel’s destruction like writer Peter Beinart or fellow Times columnist Lydia Pogreen do—that he has been “abducted by ICE” or that his free speech is being repressed is not only untrue. It’s a form of gaslighting intended to divert us from the fact that his activities, which they support, were aimed at suppressing the speech of Jews. Foreign terror supporters have no intrinsic right to remain in the United States to violate U.S. laws and endanger American citizens.
That is true whether or not it is Trump or anyone else who is enforcing the law and seeking to protect Jewish citizens.
Even if you oppose the president and believe the worst about his policies, if you care about the crisis in American education and the resulting surge in antisemitism, then you should be applauding his effort to do something about these problems.
Instead, the anti-Trump resistance is rallying to the defense of academic institutions that have abandoned a belief in equal rights, in addition to terror supporters like Khalil. Some on the political left do so because they think that Trump must be opposed on every front. Others have been so indoctrinated in woke ideology that they feel they must back the silencing of supporters of Jewish rights as well as the Western canon. Either way, opponents of the president’s efforts to roll back the woke tide and defend Jewish students are not only wrong; they have put themselves on the side of the advocates of Jew-hatred, not the U.S. Constitution.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
