03.08.25

Not good for the Jews

The Trump Administration’s HHS, DoE, GAO, and DOJ are rescinding $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, with promises of more clawbacks soon, “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

The announcement comes a few days after the university had nine students arrested for peaceful protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and the heavy police presence on campus; four were later suspended.

You recall that last spring, in a spectacular show of anticipatory obedience, Columbia repeatedly called in police to brutally expel, and arrest, students peacefully occupying a quad on campus. Many of them were Jewish. The university set up a military-like cordon around the campus and banned student organizations promoting Palestinian liberation, including Jewish Voice for Peace. It empaneled a committee to combat antisemitism, excluding all the university’s distinguished scholars of antisemitism. Because this was not enough for Congressional right-wing Zionists, President Minouche Shafik, like Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign. Shafik should have resigned, but not because she was too soft on protesters.

Tenured Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, also was forced out, after Republican Rep Elissa Stefanik twisted her statements and Shafik bent a knee and promised to address Franke’s alleged misconduct. The university undertook an investigation on trumped-up charges that Franke had created a hostile environment for Israeli faculty. In fact, Franke was relentlessly harassed by pro-Israel faculty and students. Her offense was criticizing Israel’s human rights abuses—which she has done for years—and speaking up for the rights of students protesting the war on Gaza.

This Wednesday, Congress held what Zeteo counts as its fifteenth hearing on antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023.

To be clear, Congress & the Trump administration are not protecting Jewish college students from discrimination.

The goal is to destroy higher education, particularly its most elite institutions. (This week, in a double whammy of self-destructive cost-slashing and suicidal isolationism, the White House also indefinitely “paused” all U.S. study-abroad grants, including the Fulbright).

Defense of Jews is a pretext.

A reminder: Elon Musk is a Nazi. The Pentagon’s new deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, is a prolific propagator of antisemitic conspiracy theories. HHS Secretary RFK Jr has not so subtly suggested that Ashkenazi Jews unleashed Covid on the world. The FBI has announced it will relax surveillance and investigation of neo-Nazi terrorist cells, which have been regrouping in the U.S. since the president’s pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists, to focus on surveillance of left-wing and anti-racist organizations including Black Lives Matter and the imaginary formation they call antifa.