Trump Has a Golden Opportunity To Deploy Federal Law Against Campus Antisemites

President-elect Trump’s second term offers an opportunity to renew enforcement of America’s laws dealing with the growing scourge of antisemitism — which has been on the rise in the aftermath of October 7 and the Biden administration’s seeming indifference.For the past four years the federal government has taken what is most charitably described as a “hands off” approach to enforcing these laws. Since the attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent spread of overt campus antisemitism, that approach has become all the more obvious, especially to those of us in the legal activist field. The lack of law enforcement is certainly not due to a dearth of civil rights and other laws that have been violated by pro-Hamas campus activists. Since October 7, these activities have, in many cases, violated Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act, federal anti-terror laws, and state public accommodations laws. Most notably, this antisemitic activity has breached federal “Deprivation of Rights” laws that prohibit private parties from interfering with the exercise of constitutional and other federally protected rights. These deprivation of rights laws originated in the Enforcement Act of 1870 as a response to activity by the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction-era South. These measures, which come in both civil and criminal forms and are often referred to as the “KKK Laws,” are ones that many civil rights organizations, including the one that I co-founded, have been focusing on. In the past year, we’ve seen antisemitic messaging at universities calling to “hunt down” Jews. Pro-Hamas groups organize campaigns to silence Jewish voices while making aspects of the campus environment effectively off-limits to Jewish students and faculty. If there were ever a scenario made for the enforcement of the KKK Laws, post-October 7 campus antisemitism is that scenario.Just last month, the House of Representatives documented the extensive, nationwide capitulation of universities to antisemitic mobs in a report stating that its “review of disciplinary information, produced by 11 universities,” found that “the schools utterly failed to enforce their rules and impose discipline in response to antisemitic conduct violations.” That failure, the House concluded, ended up “encouraging future transgressions,” and noted cases where “radical faculty thwarted meaningful discipline.”The Biden administration has refused to take action though, even after my organization sent three separate detailed prosecution requests to Attorney General Garland. Members of Congress, too, led by Representative Ryan Zinke, sent similar demands to the Department of Justice, pointing out that “by their terms, as they have been enforced over the decades, the Deprivation of Rights Laws specifically apply to” the “campaign against American Jews” by campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. Mr. Zinke added that “Not since the Holocaust have Jews faced the type of systemic, organized attacks as they are now facing from SJP and its affiliates. SJP is engaging in the antithesis of peaceful protest and they are targeting one of the nation’s most vulnerable constituencies.”It’s not just the KKK Laws that are being selectively enforced; Title VI enforcement, the subject of many Congressional investigations in the last year, has also been an area that the Biden administration politicized. My organization has filed a number of Title VI complaints and in one case, relating to the University of California, the Department of Education recently entered into a settlement agreement that blamed the victims while imposing no real remedial consequences to ensure that the problem of campus antisemitism was properly addressed. The settlement was so weak that it has been described as letting the University of California “off the hook.”This travesty must be reversed by the incoming Trump administration. First, the Department of Justice must review complaints filed from and after October 7, 2023 regarding campus deprivations of rights by antisemitic groups and individuals and prosecute those cases as appropriate under the criminal KKK Laws. Second, the Department of Education must revisit recent Biden administration settlements of Title VI investigations, rescind those agreements that did not comply with Title VI guidelines on antisemitism and impose meaningful consequences on the subject universities to prevent future attacks on Jewish students. Third, the Department of Justice must bring federal antiterrorism cases against those campuses and campus groups that provided Hamas and other terror organizations with material support, which includes providing valuable public relations services for these terror organizations. Finally, the entire federal government must review how it has been infected by antisemitism, especially among agency staff, and immediately terminate those individuals who have provided support for terrorism and antisemitism.The first Trump administration made revolutionary changes to protect Jewish Americans and combat terror; the incoming Trump administration can now act to build on prior successes to ensure fairness and equality for Jews across the country, in particular, those on university campuses.

Trump Has a Golden Opportunity To Deploy Federal Law Against Campus Antisemites

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