My Thoughts on Trump's War on Antisemitism Really Pissed People Off

Here I consider the question: am I a self-hating libtard cuck Jew who would let the terrorists win?

Last week I had a piece published in Racket News that managed to alienate nearly everyone on all sides of the conversation around Trump, Israel, Columbia, and antisemitism. My central argument was that in his ostensible attempt to combat hatred of Jews, Trump has infringed on the First Amendment rights of anti-Israel campus activists (here’s another example), and that an alliance with a demagogue like Donald Trump is the last thing we Jews need. I specifically argued against the Trump Administration’s detaining, without charges, grad student Mahmoud Khalil, who was among the leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, an organization that fuses antisemitism, financial illiteracy, and caps lock.

Pro-Palestinian readers charged me with exhibiting condescension towards anti-Israel protesters on campus. This camp at least gets credit for reading comprehension. I wish I could say the same for my Zionist detractors, some of whom appeared to think I’m under the impression that movements like Khalil’s are advocating for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. It seems that for some readers, my tangential suggestion that not every twenty-year-old engaging in anti-Israel protest harbors hatred for Jews obscured my central point: that as loathsome as these protestors may be, Jews, and Americans as a whole, are better off defending their right to spew garbage, and Khalil’s right to due process.

I thought I was just stating the obvious. But the general verdict among the comments section—the most brutal I’ve ever inspired—is that I am a fool. It’s not about speech, my critics say; it’s about the actions of these protesters that go beyond speech, like trespassing and vandalism—actions for which many appear to believe Khalil should be held responsible. 

I also want people guilty of these offenses to be held responsible for them. But the fact that the Manhattan DA has been loath to prosecute law-breaking students doesn’t justify the federal government specifically targeting a non-law-breaking student. (Khalil has not been criminally charged.) Our laws punish individuals, not collectives.

Fine, but can I not recognize a national-security threat when it practically announces itself? My critics would argue the government doesn’t just have the right, it has the responsibility to eject from our nation any non-citizen who aligns with a violent, anti-American, anti-social movement. Khalil, who is not an American citizen (though he is married to one) and came here on a student visa, would certainly qualify as such. 

I get it. It’s hard to see footage like this and not want everyone involved thrown out of the country. But this is why we have freedom of speech: to protect us from the despotic urges of people like me. 

Khalil’s deportation was initially sought under a constitutionally suspect 1952 law that allows the government to remove anyone who presents a risk to the US’s foreign policy goals. (Since his arrest, the administration has rummaged through Khalil’s immigration paperwork enough to allege dishonesty on his visa application, which, given the order of events here, seems like a pretextual afterthought.) Putting aside the idea that a grad-school activist for divestment who can’t even grasp the meaning of an index fund could pose a serious threat to whatever the US’s goals are vis-a-vis Israel, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to those howling for Khalil’s deportation that the shoe could easily be on the other foot. These folks would rightly be up in arms if an administration more hostile to Israel sought to deport a foreign student for speaking out in support of Zionism. 

I can’t believe I should have to explain this, but this is why it is practically always the right call to defend the rights of people to say whatever the hell they like: start curtailing that right, and what happens when your position falls out of favor?

All this said, I may have committed a rhetorical sin in not establishing my Zionist bona fides before launching into my argument. So, here they are: I have reported critically on anti-Zionism among college students and urban liberals for The Free Press, I believe that Israel should exist, and I believe that anti-Zionism as a whole is rooted in a hatred of Jews. But my conviction that not every individual anti-Zionist hates Jews was evidently too subtle a point for those who view this topic through a with-us-or-against-us lens. I made the point because I think it’s ultimately better for the Jews if we don’t tar every anti-Zionist as a bigot. Perhaps it would have been better to save that argument for a different essay.

It also may have been unfair of me to draw an equivalency between the kind of speech that liberals on campus have shouted down in recent years and the speech promulgated by anti-Zionists. The right has positioned itself as defenders of free speech as of late and has rightly mocked those who insist that “words are violence.” But the problem with the “words are violence” people isn’t just that words obviously aren’t violence; it’s that this camp imputes violent intent to anyone who disagrees with them. Charging someone arguing that biological sex is real with advocating for trans genocide is patently crazy; charging Hamas glorifiers with advocating for the genocide of Jews is less of a stretch.

So it was that I also may have erred in implying that antisemitism on campus is merely an occasional inconvenience and not a pervasive threat to Jewish students requiring intervention. One X user’s reaction cut pretty deep: “The absolute minimizing of what’s happened on campus as ‘intermittently unpleasant’ should be disqualifying in and of itself. But mazal on the piece, I guess.”

I wouldn’t be a good libtard if I didn’t genuflect to the argument that if I haven’t experienced it, I shouldn’t opine about it. I do suspect I was too dismissive of Jewish students’ fear in the face of speech I feel should be protected. The question is how to mitigate the problem.

I should have made clear that antisemitism on college campuses is real. It stems from a conceptualization of humanity as divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, and which often casts Jews—certainly Israelis—as villains. It’s a worldview marked by a simplistic understanding of human psychology and an allergy to both nuance and historical fact. It’s unlikely that deporting any perceived security threats will serve to correct any of that. More likely, it will only reinforce the idea that one’s primary purpose in life is to rage against the oppressors—and that anti-Zionism is the voice of the oppressed.