Fake Anti-Antisemitism: The Ultimate Defense for a Fascist

Columbia University has become ground-zero for MAGA efforts to stifle “liberal bias” on university campuses. The Trump administration has canceled $400 million in federal grants to the university, ostensibly for Columbia’s failure “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.” The focus on the university stems from demonstrations on campus last year protesting Israeli military actions that have damaged or destroyed 90% of structures in Gaza, leaving nearly 2 million people homeless and killing at least 45,000 Palestinians. So far, the university administration seems to be capitulating to the administration’s demands.

But what, exactly, constitutes antisemitism? The Trump administration’s letter sent to Columbia accepts the definition of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) published in 2016:  “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” In its explanatory examples, that document explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” [holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism]

 I.e, protesting actions of the Israeli government is not in itself antisemitic. If it’s okay to, say, protest Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, it’s equally legitimate to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

The administration then followed up by arresting and threatening to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent participant in the protests who is Palestinian but is a legal US permanent resident holding a “green card” and married to a US citizen. Khalil isn’t charged with any crime. His arrest was reportedly based a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act which says any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” Marco Rubio accused Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But no evidence has been shown of his having any contact with Hamas, taking direction from it or providing material support to it. According to the New York Times, “the rationale is that the anti-Israel protests Mr. Khalil helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia…Mr. Rubio’s argument is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world and that it would undermine this policy objective to tolerate Mr. Khalil’s continued presence in the United States.” [www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/us/trump-rubio-khalil-columbia-student-protests.html]

Trump said on March 10 that Khalil is “the first arrest of many to come” and that “we know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

But by the very definition that the Trump administration uses in its demand letter to Columbia, protesting the actions of the Israeli government is explicitly cited as NOT antisemitism, so how then can participation in such protests be grounds for arrest and deportation?

And then there is that First Amendment about freedom of speech, which applies equally to all legal residents of the United States as well as citizens. That means that even if Khalil had expressed support for Hamas (which as far as we know he did not), that would be protected speech under the First Amendment.

Clearly, other things are at play here.

Conservatives since Reagan have whined about the “leftist” political environment of American universities, which they claim brainwashes students with liberal ideas. Colleges were hotbeds of protests during the Vietnam War, but since then campuses have been oddly quiet and concerned more about cultural issues like gender equity and “Me Too” and “cancel culture”. Even during Trump 1.0, students seemed mostly tuned out, and the resistance came mainly from older adults. The George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests had some resonance on campuses, but the leadership and impetus came from elsewhere.

Still, MAGA Republicans have stayed obsessed with slaying the perceived ideological threat coming from America’s universities. In Florida, Ron DeSantis has aggressively gone after state colleges, demanding changes in curricula to eliminate any hint of “wokeness” and firing administrators and liberal Board of Trustees members and installing his own. Similar things are happening in other states run by Republican governors and legislatures. But elite private universities remained outside their control.

Now Trump has found the weapon to bludgeon even private Ivy League schools into submission: money. Major research universities whether public or private depend heavily on grants from the federal government to pay for research programs and subsidize graduate students who are the grunts who carry them out. If the money is cut off, universities have to cut their research programs and cannot recruit and admit nearly as many students, all of which has cascading effects on faculty retention and general operating expenses. The result has been a spectacle of university presidents from elite schools groveling in front of MAGA Republicans and sometimes losing their jobs anyway. As a recent essay by Harvard faculty members Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky observed: “Most universities — including Harvard — have responded to these attacks with strategies of self-preservation. They are lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.” [www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/14/enos-levitsky-harvard-columbia-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJBtvhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfVQ5wPkTR9KPCi2BjvfUqjqHABJ0u1Ap-8bveMdJ6vFsF1IH9Sz05ToLw_aem_ncqO7c5xGT_mvAy4PSoG0A]

But even Trumpistas need a justification to deny funds to higher education, and they have found the perfect instrument by claiming to be leading the fight against antisemitism on campus—especially when the definition of antisemitism can be expanded to include criticism of the government of Israel. So when protests over the Israeli devastation of Gaza erupted at Columbia last year, it seemed they had found the perfect storm: a big high-profile protest for Palestinian rights at an Ivy League school with a large number of Jewish students (and faculty) and an embattled and intimidated university president in the country’s largest media market. Columbia was made the example of what could happen if university administrations didn’t bend the knee, and universities across the country all took notice, especially when they found their own programs taking hits as DOGE rampaged through the federal government. Johns Hopkins found $800 million in its grants had been cancelled. The gutted and MAGA-led Department of Education launched investigations of alleged antisemitism at 60 other universities.

As the Enos/Levitsky article in the Harvard Crimson noted, the MAGA strategy is working. “America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education…To our knowledge, no major university leadership has publicly denounced the attack on Columbia or Mahmoud Khalil. In the face of an open assault on a peer Ivy League institution and basic principles of free speech, Harvard remains silent. With American democracy on the line, the University has crawled into a protective shell.”

As they also note, the Trump administration’s claim to be fighting campus antisemitism is bogus. Ironically, there are few sectors of American society more antisemitic than the murkier depths of TrumpWorld. (Remember the tiki-torch-bearing khaki-clad bros in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!”) Trump’s white evangelical base isn’t too keen on American Jews either, but they do love Israel because they think it will usher in the Second Coming. Basically, in America, Israeli Jews are accepted as white people, while Palestinians are not.

It is worth noting yet again that much of the most detailed, accurate, and effective criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the Left Bank has been made by Jews both in Israel and the US. Indeed, demonstrators from Jewish Voice for Peace entered the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on March 13 to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, chanting “not in our name” and “stop arming Israel.” Some 98 of them were arrested. [apnews.com/article/columbia-university-protests-khalil-trump-tower-8e2f455134a2f1b82458e32aecbb59f7]

Every American administration since Israel was created in 1948 has paid hypocritical lip service to the notion of Palestinian rights, while continuing to back Israel to the hilt. Even so, that support reached a new level during Trump 1.0, when he reversed decades of US policy by moving the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and ending US efforts under Obama to curb new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Biden (shamefully in my view) continued to provide the very weapons that leveled Gaza, while feebly and completely ineffectively calling for a ceasefire to end the slaughter of its inhabitants. Now Trump has raised US policy to an unprecedented level of absurdity by advocating the removal of 2 million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and turning the area into a fabulous resort for “world people”, while effectively endorsing full Israeli sovereignty over the entire West Bank. Even Netanyahu couldn’t quite believe his ears.

Decades of official US policy catering to Israel as well as pro-Israeli treatment by US news media and popular entertainment lauding Israeli heroism and success have had the intended effect of creating a heavy bias within the American public in favor of Israel. Meanwhile, the history of Palestinian displacement and oppressive treatment by the Israeli government, military, and settler groups has barely penetrated the American consciousness. We hear about it when Israeli Jews are killed by suicide bombers, but we don’t hear about Israeli reprisals that kill far more Palestinians.

Then there is the Holocaust, the fact and horror of which no intelligent and educated person can question. It is widely considered to be the ur-atrocity of the 20^th century, responsible for the systematic killing of 6 million Jews (and perhaps an equal or greater number of non-Jews). Western guilt over the Holocaust played a very significant role in the establishment of the state of Israel after World War II and it has remained an emotional touchstone ever since. But it is not an all-purpose excuse and justification for anything and everything that Israel has done and might do in the future.

Because of all this, Americans are primed to believe it when charges of antisemitism are raised and conversely to shrug off or minimize the significance of Israeli government policies and actions that dispossess or imprison or kill or subject Palestinians to chronic humiliation and harassment. The scales of public opinion are grossly and unfairly out of balance.

No moral person wants to be accused of antisemitism, which is precisely why making such an accusation is the ultimate defense for a cynical fascist like Donald Trump. He can stifle free speech and impose his own version of “political correctness” on universities throughout the country by arbitrarily withholding federal money while posing as a champion of the battle against antisemitism. In the meantime, his tactics and policies across the board are straight out of the fascist playbook. In this version, the “enemy” and scapegoats aren’t Jews; they are brown immigrants and anyone who calls out his lawlessness and corruption. He uses anti-antisemitism as cover to subvert democratic values and intimidate the opposition. And Trump’s fake anti-antisemitism is really pro-ethnic-cleansing.