How to Deal with Antisemitism on Campus

As is well known, many American campuses have been roiled by raucous and menacing anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protesters. Jewish students have been briefly held prisoner by groups of these protesters who surround them, all the while screaming their slogans in the faces of those they hold hostage, an ordeal that leaves Jews afraid. They have had their kippahs knocked off, mezuzahs ripped from the door jambs outside their college rooms, seen pro-Israel speakers, including invited speakers from elsewhere drowned out by pro-Palestinian mobs who either block the speaker’s entrance to the lecture hall, or instead, attend the lecture only in order to jump up, on cue, a few minutes to the talk, to scream their slogans about “apartheid” and “genocide,” which often result in the talk being cancelled and the would-be speaker hurriedly leaving. Thus do these campus brownshirts prevent students from hearing speakers who are pro-Israel.

More on this state of affairs and on ideas as to how to change the anti-Israel and antisemitic atmosphere on too many campuses, can be found here:

Here’s a snapshot of what it’s like to be Jewish on an American college campus these days: In Tulane, a Jewish student engaging classmates who were burning the Israeli flag was assaulted and had his nose broken.

In Columbia, a verbal exchange about the war in Gaza escalated into an altercation, with a Jewish student hit forcefully on the head and sent to the hospital.

Pro-Palestinian students at Harvard marched openly through campus, calling for an armed uprising that would lead to the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state. Death threats, harassment, exclusion—these are now the rule, not the exception, on the quad….

The problem is international students….

When thugs disrupted classes at MIT—the logic of the “free Palestine,” movement, as ever, being reduced to nothing but forceful disruption—the university’s president wrote a note to gently warn the bullies against possible consequences. Not, mind you, that said consequences would be meted out by the university itself; that would require moral clarity and a backbone. Instead, president Sally Kornbluth wrote to alert her jovially antisemitic charges that should they persist in bashing Jews, there would be “serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues.”…

In other words, the American government might decide to withdraw student visas from those found to be encouraging support for terrorism — as with these raucous pro-Hamas demonstrators — as well as spouting antisemitic rhetoric (such as “Gas the Jews” ) false claims that tend to imperil Israelis and Jews in this country (such as “Stop the Genocide”) and annihilationist demands for the elimination of the Jewish state, and the expulsion or killing of all of its Jewish citizens, which is what “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” means, if rightly understood.

As Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), backed by other Republican lawmakers, explained in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “student visa applicants, like all non-immigrant visa applicants, must qualify under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to be approved for a visa. They are subject to a wide range of ineligibilities in Section 212(a) of the INA. Section 212(a)(3)(B)(i)(VII) of the INA states that, ‘any alien – who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible.’”…

Cheering Hamas attacks — a group designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department 27 years ago — and which, on October 7, murdered and kidnapped not only Israelis but also scores of American citizens, surely qualifies as “endorsing or espousing terrorist activity,” and these campus agitators — many of them Palestinians or other Muslim Arabs — work to “persuade others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.”

Herein lies the answer: Lawmakers can—and must—decree that any institution that allows foreign students to support terrorism with impunity would no longer be eligible to a single cent of taxpayer money….

Congress can do much to reduce or eliminate the spectacle of these anti-Israel and antisemitic mobs on campuses, squirting their antisemitic venom, mindlessly chanting anti-Israel slogans, and making life unpleasant for Jews on campuses in a hundred sundry ways, ranging from scrawling swastikas on walls, holding Jewish students briefly hostage, knocking off kippahs, pulling off necklaces from which a Jewish apotropaic amulet hangs, stealing mezuzahs, and even physically assaulting Jewish classmates.

First, Congress can insist that the visas of foreign students be cancelled if they are shown to have approved of, or endorsed, Hamas and other designated terrorist groups. Applauding the October 7 attacks would be enough of a demonstration of such approval, and should be grounds for withdrawing the visas from foreign students. Let them take their hate elsewhere.

Second, Congress can decrease federal funding for colleges and universities that do not crack down on antisemitism on their campuses. That potential. Loss of government grants will get the attention of college presidents better than any appeals to morality.

Defund those universities — take away the federal funding of every kind that they have been receiving – that do not crack down on antisemitism. Deport those foreign students who, in constituting the hard-core of the anti-Israel, pro- Hamas demonstrations, have violated the requirements of their visas. Defund and deport – these policies will go a long way to restoring calm to our college campuses.