How (not) to keep Jews safe

[Celerity]

President Donald Trump’s anti-antisemitism crusade should make everyone nervous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/26/trump-antisemitism-columbia-university-khalil/

https://archive.ph/kTGFc


Demonstrators in New York City protest the arrest by Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, on March 20. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Columbia University has now caved to President Donald Trump’s bullying, and one of its student protesters has fallen into a Kafkaesque immigration black hole. At least two other students, from Columbia and Cornell University, have been hunted by immigration authorities after they too criticized Israel. Trump says these are victories in a crusade to protect Jewish people. In reality, Trump has made Jewish Americans — among other historically persecuted peoples — far less safe.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim to be combating antisemitism while coddling avowed antisemites. Multiple senior Trump aides have embraced the antisemitic “great replacement theory” and delivered Nazi salutes (or rather, harmless waves that so closely resemble Nazi salutes that even self-proclaimed Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes called them “excessive”). Administration officials have also lately canoodled with Germany’s Holocaust-downplaying far-right party, with Elon Musk urging Germans to get over their country’s “past guilt” already.

One senior Trump official at the Pentagon recently amplified neo-Nazi conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by an antisemitic mob in Marietta, Georgia, a century ago. (The case helped lead to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.) And of course Trump himself has often played footsie with white supremacists, flattering them as “fine people” who should “stand back and stand by.”

In such context, Trump’s invocation of anti-antisemitism as a rationale to punish Columbia and its students (nearly a quarter of whom are Jewish) seems disingenuous at best. Stripping $400 million in financial aid, grants and research opportunities from the university is likely to hurt many more Jewish students than it helps. More important, as Jews and other historically persecuted groups have learned, the best protection against oppression and violence is a commitment to a free society that respects civil rights, rule of law and due process.

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[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. tRump and his CONservative goobermint ARE the anti-semites. Years of using Soros' name as a proxy for "jew". . . nt

[dalton99a]

2. And the Nazi parasite is de facto president

[Passages]

3. There are strange bedfellows on this one.

Some will stay silent and or look the other way.

[tulipsandroses]

4. Those congressional hearings that ousted the presidents of Ivy League universities, all women - was another way

for them to exercise their hate against women and minorities and education period.

They used that as a way to curtail free speech, women in leadership. It had nothing to do with fighting anti semitism.

It is maddening that the party that routinely uses anti semitic tropes, uses George Soros' name to instill fear as the "Jew behind the curtain", claims to want to fight anti-semitism.

[Ping Tung]

5. Nationalism of all sorts has become the plague of the 21st century.

"My country right or wrong" is making a return around the world. The result is xenophobia, racism, and injustice.