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antisemitism
The Palestine Exception, Right-Wing Elite Capture, and New Student Visa Rules
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking.
May 30, 2025
People in the United States of America continue to allow the normalization of very dangerous measures solidifying authoritarian government, and the administration of President Donald Trump continues to escalate each measure. The latest measure arrived on May 27 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended all embassy reviews of applications for student and exchange visas from foreign nationals, stating that a new policy including social media vetting will be announced soon. Rubio also suspended scheduling any new interviews for three types of visas that enable foreign nationals to participate in U.S. institutions: F (for students at academic institutions), M (for students in vocational or non-academic schools), and J (for teaching and research exchange visitors). The new policy has not been revealed yet.
Here is yet another case that should break the people of the U.S.—if not the feckless supposed opposition party, the Democrats—from their political paralysis. The Trump administration inherited a largely informal apparatus of campus repression relying on the defamation, arrest, and suspension of students and faculty members who opposed the U.S. role in supporting what the Israeli government now openly admits is a campaign of deliberate starvation and full land dispossession of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s administration seized upon the zeitgeist already brewed by university leaders and fueled by a coalition of Zionist and far-right organizations, and seized it with an aim far more expansive than simply punishing pro-Palestinian activism and speech.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state.
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking. The “Palestine exception” has proven to be a useful proxy as its enforcers are not simply the usual MAGA suspects, but include many liberal Democrats and cultural custodians who spent the last few years warning of Trump’s dangers while gladly serving as the handmaids of a repression whose contours they foolishly believed they could limit to one supposedly justified cause. The collaboration with only nominal opponents of antisemitism was a clever move by the MAGA right, as it bound them to silence in a pivotal early phase.
Now the later phase of the Trumpian war on free speech and free thought in higher education is unleashed, and the sorts of powers that Rubio will soon wield over student and researcher visas will allow for the state to pick and choose who enters the halls of academe—and who will be punished for eventually transgressing servitude to the ruling ideology.
Some people are mistakenly calling Trump’s higher education measures an “attack on universities.” Trump’s agenda is far from an attack—it is a right-wing elite capture, in which the current liberal managerial keepers of institutions either are replaced with MAGA counterparts or the current keepers break down and comply (and some already have). Jokes abound about the possible mismatch of some poorly-educated MAGA bootlicker running Harvard or Yale, but Trump’s administration and its congressional lackeys are mostly Ivy Leaguers themselves. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the most strident congressional Inquisitor of college presidents, is a Yale graduate like Vice President JD Vance. Trump went to Penn. Steve Bannon went to Harvard, like Pete Hegseth.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state. He has tried the same at Columbia University, and his administration states that the University of California system is next. The Task Force on Antisemitism led by gadfly former television commentator Leo Terrell functions as a spear tip of moralistic outrage masking the shakedown that Trump’s gangster presidency is actually waging. Trump and his collaborators don’t want to shut down Harvard, Columbia, or any institution of higher education whose trustees will turn over the keys to the MAGA regime. As the DOGE “cuts” demonstrate, the Trump administration understands how to effect ideological capture using traditional but empty Republican rhetoric about balancing budgets and preventing “waste.” The goal is to claim the spoils of the state, and use all state organs to assault private institutions that harbor resistance to the state.
Of course, this ideological capture is far from abstract as it brutally impacts the lives of foreign students lawfully studying and exerting their First Amendment rights (which apply to everyone on our soil, contrary to the Trump doctrine’s insistence otherwise) in the United States. Before both the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in May, Rubio reiterated his servile liturgy on the pro-Palestinian students targeted by the Trump administration, sometimes at the behest of Zionist organizations like Betar.
“I will continue to revoke student visas,” Rubio stated, while also repeating an argument ad hominem that the targeted students occupied and damaged campus buildings and threatened other students. When asked about the case of the now-released Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Özturk, who was arrested and disappeared to Louisiana for the mere act of co-signing a student newspaper editorial, Rubio reset to the same defamatory lines about breaking campus rules and a visa not being a right but a privilege.
Georgetown University postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri, baselessly accused by the Department of Homeland Security of spreading Hamas propaganda, was chained at the ankles and wrists during his detention at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where he was housed from his March arrest until a federal judge ordered his release in May. Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who actually holds a green card and not a visa, remains incarcerated in Louisiana and missed the birth of his child and his graduation ceremony.
While the ultimate goal of the Trump administration is a right-wing elite capture of higher education, especially its most prestigious institutions, the weaponization of the Palestine exception will not be dissipating any time soon. In the wake of federal judges freeing some of the students disappeared for their speech, Trump ally U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) declared that “Palestinianism”—by which he means all recognition of Palestinian people as human beings—is terrorism that should not be allowed in U.S. Fine also endorsed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza to murder its entire remaining population. After the terrible murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside of the Capitol Jewish Museum by a purported pro-Palestine activist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that even stating “Free Palestine” is equivalent to saying “Heil Hitler.” Hate speech that keeps possible opponents of authoritarianism divided—and causes real harm—tragically is one of the main currencies of Trump’s MAGA movement.
No one should expect any consistency even on the question of antisemitism, because Trump is only committed to hegemonic power for his state and its collaborators. There is no moral principles held categorically, which is why moralistic opposition politics have largely done nothing to stop Trump’s hold on power tightening. While Rubio is railing against pro-Palestine students, Trump’s white nationalist supporters were cheering the admission into the U.S. of 49 Afrikaaner farmers from South Africa, including one who had called Jewish people “dangerous” and “untrustworthy.” Again, Trump wants immigration just like he wants Harvard—just in forms that extend his ideological capture and venerate his broadly racist, patriarchal nationalism.
As international students comprise 5.9% of U.S. university admissions, they represent a mighty financial cudgel. In 2023-4, 25% of international students in the U.S. were studying math or computer science and 20% were studying engineering, they may be less likely to engage in political activism than their domestic counterparts and even before Trump more likely to keep a low profile to their host government (not to mention governments back home). Trump’s coalition includes a lot of people who are genuine extremist Zionists, so expect him to offer up more international students and for the State Department’s new policies to include social media scans of pro-Palestine content. Yet also expect Trump to be ready to make deals with any and all institutions of higher education who will cave to his demands for controlling allowable teaching and expression—and any nations who pledge that their students will arrive obedient. And, tragically, expect a lot of U.S. universities and colleges to fall in line.
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Repressive Governments Never Let an Assassination Go to Waste
The murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of Palestinians.
May 24, 2025
On November 7, 1938, Polish Jew Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris.
Grynszpan’s family had been made stateless by German and Polish governments, and were stranded in miserable conditions along with thousands of Jewish refugees at the Polish-German border.
The shooting of vom Rath provided the trigger for the Nazi pogrom across Germany of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—attacks of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. This date is thought to mark the progression from German persecution of Jews to the beginning of the Holocaust.
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims.
Today’s moment, the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of 2 millions residents of Gaza, and the rest of occupied Palestine.
Just as with Grynszpan’s crime, the effect of this killer’s decision will be out of his hands, and the cause of his desperation will only matter to those who already care.
The wretched, amoral lunatics who have command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have a clear field to “investigate” the curriculum of universities that host Palestinian studies, and criminalize the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
We can count on crimes being committed by Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) in exploitation of this moment. The crocodile tears of this Proud Boy-aligned Christian nationalist government as they express solidarity with Jews against “antisemitism” will challenge our gag reflex.
The conflation of protesters for Palestine with “terrorists,” already in full force by the Departments of State and Education with expulsion of international students who have spoken out and organized, will be untrammeled by due process. Or due process will be twisted with the power of a state unbound by ethics in their determination to “make an example.”
The day following the Washington shooting, the AJC’s Ted Deutch was on MSNBC’s afternoon “Dateline White House” program, instructing that permitting campus demonstrations for Gazans’ right to live allows us to “tolerate hatred and antisemitism that leads to this violence.” Deutch made the rounds of Fox and CNN also.
In his morning MSNBC program appearance, he said, efforts must “double down” to insure that “what we saw last night never happens again and that words of antisemites, incitement that we’ve seen at too many places around the world, be treated as it is, that this could be the deadly result if we don’t act.”
The AJC, once fully cognizant of the dangers of turning the heterogenous Jewish people spread across the world in to a nationality, made sure in the aftermath of these pointless deaths that suppressing “delegitimization” of Israel was the focus, not Jewish rights to safety in their countries.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has watched the methodical torture of 2 million people in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, month after month of civilian displacement; destruction; hunger; disease; and killing by bomb, artillery, drone, and bullet. U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, in February 2024, immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest America’s assistance in the misery. In December 2023 and September 2024 fatal self-immolations were enacted in front of Israel’s consulates in Atlanta and Boston.
The world watching—protesting, agonizing in helplessness—the horror of premeditated and systematic destruction of the people of Gaza has the obvious hazard of endangering Jews. A gossamer sense of object permanence is exhibited when Zionist advocacy at one moment proclaims Israel the state of the Jewish people, and the next decries hostility to Israel a symptom of some mysterious eternal human disease of antisemitism.
It is certain that the Washington killings will be used to maximize the sense of dread and siege in Jewish spaces, shaped to legitimize the Zionist stance that Israel is rational and her opponents crazed, irrational, bloodthirsty.
After the 9/11/2001 attacks, journalist James Bennett contacted Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office.
That evening, I tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-and-future Israeli prime minister, to ask what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations. “It’s very good,” he replied, with startling enthusiasm. Then he caught himself. “Well, it’s not very good, but it’s going to generate immediate sympathy.”
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims. Today, Zionist partisans in the United States of America, in and out of government, have their “bloody shirt.” Mazel tov!
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Attacks on ‘Political’ Graduation Speakers Are Craven Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
All students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
May 20, 2025
Last week New York University announced that it was withholding the diploma of a graduating senior named Logan Rozos, and commencing disciplinary proceedings against him. His academic “crime?” As a featured graduation speaker, Rozos described the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and expressed moral outrage that the attacks were supported by U.S. tax dollars and university investments.
These sentiments, of course, are not universally shared. They, predictably, provoked and offended those present who do not like it when Israel is criticized in this way. More importantly, their expression violates what is quickly becoming an 11th Commandment of Academic Life in the United States: Thou Shall Not Criticize Israel.
And so NYU official spokesperson John Beckman, a true inspiration to his increasingly craven profession, immediately vaulted into action to denounce the student and the speech:
NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views. He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.
Apparently, those who “lead” NYU believe that graduation speakers—typically selected because of their academic distinction or other exemplary accomplishments—should not express themselves honestly or say anything controversial, should clear their remarks with university censors in advance, and then say only things that will make everyone happy. To challenge an audience on a campus is thus forbidden. Most importantly, invited speakers must never violate the new 11th Commandment.
If this strikes you as anti-intellectual, censorious, and absurdly patronizing, consider the perhaps even more outrageous controversy surrounding Harvard’s 2024 Commencement Address, given by Maria Ressa, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defense of press freedom, and civil liberties, in her native Philippines and in the world at large.
While this controversy unfolded at Harvard last year, it was brought to national attention only weeks ago, with the April 29 publication of Harvard’s Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which cited Ressa’s speech as an example of the “bias” that the report is charged with countering.
According to the report’s Executive Summary, “Ressa chose not to deliver prepared remarks that were meant to urge pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students to reconcile. Instead, she substituted new remarks praising the student protestors and delivered off-the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” The authors then ask: “Why did a renowned humanitarian ad-lib seemingly antisemitic remarks against her Jewish critics at a highly scripted Harvard graduation ceremony?”
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness.
When I read these words, on page 12 of the 311-page report, I was shocked and in disbelief. For I have long admired Ressa, have followed her closely, and consider her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, to be one of the very best books I’ve read in recent years. The report’s question struck a chord. Maria Ressa is an antisemite? How can this be?
The first thing I did was search for her commencement speech to see for myself what offensive things she said. I quickly found both a transcript and a video, read the first and watched the second, and remained confused about the “seemingly antisemitic remarks.” The speech seemed fine to me; and as I watched it, I wished my own university were willing and able to invite such a fine person to give a commencement address.
Only then did I turn to the more elaborate explanation of the problem, on pages 116-17 of the report. Apparently Ressa had shared her prepared remarks in advance (with whom? does Harvard exercise prior restraint on its speakers?), but then deviated from these remarks in her speech, in two ways that troubled the report’s authors and thus merited commentary.
First, while in her prepared remarks she very generally alluded to the many different ways that she has been attacked on social media, in her speech she said this: “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money. While the other side was already attacking me because I had been on stage with Hillary Clinton. Hard to win, right?”
These, apparently, were the “off the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.”
What????
In the offending brief paragraph, Ressa clearly references attacks from both “sides” of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine controversy. She says that those labeling her an antisemite—a scurrilous charge without a shred of evidence, I might add—have “power and money.” She does not say her attackers are Jews. She says they are rich and powerful. Because they are rich and powerful. The coverage of the event by the Texas Jewish Post—hardly an antisemitic publication—is instructive. After noting that billionaire “Bill Ackman [had] led a revolt of large donors,” the reporter offered this background:
Right-wing media and lawmakers had sought to paint Ressa as antisemitic prior to commencement, pointing to a Filipino-language editorial published in November in her media outlet, Rappler, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, and to her signing of an open letter calling on Israel to protect journalists in Gaza. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, claimed that the Rappler piece compared Israel to Hitler. That claim was amplified on the social network X by New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has gained attention for her combative questioning of university leaders, including Gay, at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. “Harvard chose an antisemitic commencement speaker,” Stefanik wrote earlier this month, sharing a link to the Free Beacon article. “The university has failed to stand up for Jewish students at every turn, revealing the depths of its moral delinquency.”
Was it antisemitic for Ressa to say that “money and power” had denounced her? Hardly. Indeed, the report itself elsewhere comments on the efforts of at least three extremely wealthy donors—Ackman, Len Blavatnik, and Ken Griffin—to use promised donations to influence Harvard in the midst of its crisis, though it does not mention that Ackman himself had called Ressa “antisemitic” in a May 3 X post, three weeks before Ressa’s commencement address. Perhaps this is why the report claims that her “offending” words “appeared to echo” antisemitic tropes, and not that they did in fact echo them? For it is hard to see how alluding to a man who is rich, powerful, and censorious as rich, powerful, and censorious echoes antisemitic tropes.
Ressa’s second “offense”: She apparently omitted a brief section of her prepared remarks challenging keffiyah-wearing pro-Palestinian protesters (the report doesn’t say whether her prepared remarks also included a comment challenging pro-Israeli protesters, but it seems likely that it did and this too was omitted), and instead delivered add-libbed praise of “student speakers who had addressed the topic of Palestine.”
Here, again, are the offending words, worth quoting at length:
I loved the speeches of the students today. They were incredible. Because these times will hopefully teach you the same lesson I learned. You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in. Because that defines who you are.
But you’re Harvard. You better get your facts right, because now you are being tested. The chilling effect means that many are choosing to stay silent because there are consequences to speaking out.
I’m shocked at the fear and anger, the paranoia splitting open the major fracture lines of society, the inability to listen. What happened to us in the Philippines, it’s here.
The campus protests are testing everyone in America. Protests are healthy. They shouldn’t be violent. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced.
These words are evidence of “antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias”?
The report proceeds to devote an entire paragraph to the fact that Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi was offended by Ressa’s speech, “quietly requested clarification” of her on the stage, and then walked off stage when she did not respond (apparently, the clarification requested involved her retaking the microphone and revising the speech she had just finished giving to Zarchi’s specifications; are such requests for “clarification” by clergy a regular practice at Harvard commencements? It is one I have never experienced at the many commencements I’ve attended.)
The report’s account of commencement says nothing about the fact that Chabad Rabbi Zarchi was embroiled in controversy back on November 7, 2023, for giving a speech in which he seemed to call both Hamas terrorists and Hamas supporters not a “human” but “an animal... below an animal.” The precise intended reference and meaning of his words notwithstanding—the subject of much semantic discussion, they seem pretty nasty to me—in this speech and elsewhere he made very clear that Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was “antisemitic” and should be decertified by the university, with its protests banned from campus. (Note: Zarchi’s comment and his anti-PSC advocacy was noted earlier in the report, on p. 110; but its obvious connection to his defensive reaction to Ressa’s speech is never drawn.) That many Jewish leaders on campus disagree strongly with Zarchi—who has collaborated extensively with Bill Ackman’s crusade against Harvard, and who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July of 2024—was also unmentioned in this narrative.
Perhaps most important, the report says nothing about the fact that the overall frame of Ressa’s entire speech was the responsibility of all students to be their “best selves” and to work together, with compassion and understanding, to make the world a better place. To reduce that speech to the identity-obsessed concerns of its critics is to engage in exactly the kind of small-mindedness that the report elsewhere decries.
Obviously, the report is about much more than this one commencement episode, and should not be judged by its treatment this one episode. But what it says about Ressa’s Commencement Address is so strikingly tendentious and misleading, that you have to wonder how this account ever made its way into a report claiming to be so very academic and serious, and what this means for the other narratives recounted in the report.
Maria Ressa is a world-renowned journalist and human rights activist. While she has suffered persecution in her own country, and while she surely is hated and even targeted by authoritarians the world over, she is not likely to be materially harmed by the denunciations of Harvard’s Chabad rabbi or the displeasure of Harvard’s top donors and administrators.
But NYU’s Logan Rozos, and many others like him, experience severe repercussions for saying similar things. U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz—a Democrat who has joined with Elise Stefanik and other Trumpists to attack so-called “antisemitism” on American campuses—was quite candid about Rozos: “He lied to the university... [and] everyone listening. There is no genocide going on in Israel... But at the end of the day, that’s up to the university whether they give him his diploma or not. You know, in fact, they can give him his diploma, it’s not going to matter. Good luck getting a job. That was a stupid, selfish thing, ruined the ceremony for a lot of families.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others who have spoken out for Palestinians and against Israel represent an even more serious form of intimidation and punishment for those who dare to violate the 11th Commandment. And make no mistake, while courts have recently ordered the release of many of these individuals pending resolution of their court cases, their cases are still being litigated, and the administration continues to pursue such deportations through every legal means available even as it pushes the boundaries of legality. In the first instance, it is foreign students and noncitizens more generally who are threatened by such efforts.
But in a broader sense, all students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
This intellectual virus is not circulating randomly. As The New York Times recently reported, The Heritage Foundation has been busy at work planning and then putting into effect its “Project Esther,” designed, as the Times puts it, “to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.” While “Esther” is largely, though not exclusively, the work of right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, it dovetails neatly with the post-October 7 efforts of the Anti-Defamation League to castigate all pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic” and to pressure campus leaders to crack down on such activity. Most importantly, these efforts have the full-throated backing of the Trump administration and its supporters in red states, like my own state of Indiana, all across the country.
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness, and contributes to the steady weakening of the freedom of expression and association that is at the heart of any decent, liberal democracy.
Such conduct is not academic leadership. It is craven submission to ideological small-mindedness and political pressure.
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