His Executive Order on Antisemitism is a Threat to Muslims and Palestinians on Campuses and an Attack on the First Amendment
Antisemitism exists. It has a long and painful history that has embedded fear in our DNA as Jews, a fear that grows when incidents occur,
like the one in Australia recently.
Police in New South Wales state, which includes Sydney, said on Wednesday they had
found explosives in a caravan, or trailer, that could have created a blast wave of 40 metres (130 feet).
There was some indication the explosives might be used in an antisemitic attack that could have caused mass casualties, police said.
There also was an apparently coordinated set of “graffiti attacks” on Jewish sites that have caused the Australian Jewish community to increase security. Similar security efforts are being ramped up by Jewish groups in Europe as threats of antisemitic acts and the growth of the Far Right stoke fears.
ShareThere have been reports of violent and deadly incidents throughout Europe, as well, with direct attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions. And there are leaders like Viktor Orhan in Hungary and political parties like Alternative for Germany who use antisemitic language and tropes, though often sanitized, amid their more targeted attacks on Muslim immigrants.
Syndicate or ReuseBooks by Hank KaletThe United States is not immune to antisemitism, of course, but American Jews seem unable to focus on the real threats. Rather than keep our eyes trained on an ascendant right wing — including many of the people in President Donald Trump’s immediate circle, including the president himself — much of the Jewish community is focused on Israel and seems intent on conflating criticism of Israel, its war on Gaza, and the occupation with actual systemic anti-Jewish action.
This is the context for Wednesday’s executive order on “combatting antisemitism,” which targets campus protests and continues a Conservative/Republican push to peel Jews away from teh Democratic Party.
The order,
as reported by The Washington Post, “is directed at universities where pro-Palestinian protests broke out last year,” and “threatens to revoke student visas of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.”
Supporters of the order argue that these protests were antisemitic. They point to some uncomfortable speech — the equation of Israel with the Nazis, for instance — as proof, and then conflate sloganeering and assembly with physical harassment. Jewish students and faculty, the argument goes, were made uncomfortable by the protests and encampments and felt unsafe. That sense of fear, they say, proves that the protests were designed to harass, even if there was no direct harassment. It is a circular argument, but one endorsed by much of the American political establishment and leading Jewish organizations
Marc H. Ellis addresses the underlying issues with these arguments in his 2009 book Judaism Does Not Equal Israel.
1 He describes what I’ll call a “triumphalist Judaism” that mixes Holocaust victimhood with Exodus (the novel) power, constructed in “the aftermath of the great Israeli triumph in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war” (6). That narrative posits several myths: that Palestine was empty and underutilized and had to be redeemed, that the “Arabs” were hostile to Jews as Jews, and that the state that was founded and that still exists remains a democratic outpost in a hostile world. This triumphalism, however, was also tied to our very real history as a persecuted minority. “Jews had once been weak and helpless,” he writes, but that was no longer the case. Yet, “our theology was telling us we were still. The fact was just the opposite. We had become empowered” and were acting as a regional power (59).
The current power dynamics in Israel/Palestine and the actual history — the forced removal of Palestinians from what is now the state and the continued usurpation of land — are treated as though they are benign acts. Israel — Jews — has become the victimizer in the region, acting as a colonial power, an occupying force.
What was “psychological,” he writes, has become “strategic.”
“If we owned up to our newfound power, we would have to be accountable for and to it. We would have to relinquish the Holocaust as the backdrop to everything Jewish.”
So Oct. 7 and the ensuing war play out as if they were new and shocking rather than as another battle — the deadliest and most traumatic, to be sure — in a decades-long rebellion by Palestinians against suppress and control by Israel.
The argument is based on an underlying anti-Muslim/anti-Arab bias that mirrors the hate and discrimination that Jews have faced across our history. It is evident in the language we (Americans and Jews) use consistently to refer to Arabs, Muslims, Palestine, and Israel. Arabs and Muslims continued to be seen as terrorists, even as the “not all” modifier is added.
Deena R. Hurwitz and Walther H. White Jr., in
an article at the American Bar Association website, cite authors Sahar Aziz and John Esposito’s May 2024 book, Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism, to underscore a “disturbing rise of Islamophobia worldwide.”
Blaming Muslim minorities for economic, political, and social problems is an increasingly common rhetorical strategy for politicians in countries globally. A narrative of the “threatening Muslim invader” is prevalent, regardless of whether the targets of such rhetoric are born citizens or new arrivals.
Trump, for instance, mixes Islamophobic and xenophobic language as he calls for closing the borders. At the same time, he and his conservative allies rely on both anti- and philosemitic imagery when talking with and about Jews.
“In the United States, Europe, and India, Islamophobic rhetoric is essentially normalized,” Hurwitz and White write.
The use of this rhetoric reduces the history and diversity within the Muslim and Arab communities (and within the Jewish community) to “a set of stereotyped characteristics most often reducible to themes of violence, civilizational subversion, and fundamental otherness.”
Anti-Palestinian racism silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, and dehumanizes Palestinians. This is used to deny and justify violence against Palestinians and fails to acknowledge Palestinians as Indigenous people with a collective identity while erasing their human rights and equal dignity
and worth.
Trump’s executive order builds on this structure of anti-Muslim/anti-Arab thought, while also endorsing stereotypes of Jews as a model minority in need of special protection — even as he dismantles what he calls the “DEI regime.” Pitting Jewish and Muslim communities against each other creates hierarchies among aggrieved groups, which the right can then use to abrogate our rights of speech, assembly, and petition. It’s also a solution that is out of proportion to the problem.
It creates a threat to international students (mostly Muslim) based purely on their protected speech and assembly, while doing nothing to improve the actual safety of Jewish students. Remember, we already have strong protections in most jurisdictions; prohibiting speech does nothing to address this.
Alex Morey of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that defends speech and academic freedom on campus and that has usually been allied with more conservative groups, describes what I’ll call an existential threat.
She told the Forward that the order’s language might push universities to crack down on protest, because it functions as an implied threat — to funding and to visas.
Morey said that her organization was already fielding frantic queries from international students at American universities who are worried about being caught in a legal dragnet.
“These are not students that got arrested at a protest or vandalized a building, these are students who just went out and protested,” she said. “What we don’t want to see is schools saying, ‘Hey, Students for Justice in Palestine, I’m going to need a list of everyone in that club and we’re going to comb it for foreign students.’”
What we are talking about is the loss of immigration status and potential deportation as retribution for protest. It is a direct attack on the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause, which provides “any person within (the United States) the equal protection of the laws,” including the First Amendment’s five basic freedoms.
The order brings together several of Trump’s favorite targets — higher education, Muslims, immigrants and protesters — and is part of a broader effort to undermine the academic freedom and speech rights of faculty and students in higher education. Trump is a wannabe autocrat. He sees these groups as a threat to his control. While fighting antisemitism is the ostensible reason for the order, the larger targets are our democratic institutions.
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