#WTH Is Trump "weaponizing antisemitism"?
Antisemitism? Bad. Anti-anti-semitism? It's good.
Wishing those who celebrate a meaningful passover… And wishing for freedom for the hostages. Let our people go.
Most Jews have been gobsmacked by the virulence of the antisemitism laid bare since the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. And it’s not just campuses; it’s workplaces, newspapers, overseas, and in America, a veritable plague. Views on Jews are not synonymous with views on Israel, but as the vast majority of Jews are pro-Israel — self-proclaimed Zionists — there is significant overlap. Here’s the new Pew poll on American attitudes towards Israel:
[T]he public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.
For antisemites in particular, there is almost complete overlap between Jews, no matter their attitudes or affiliations, and the actions of the State of Israel. It’s not simply that attacks on Jews have skyrocketed worldwide; it’s that organized pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas groups have deliberately targeted Jewish — not Israeli — organizations like Hillel and Chabad, as well as Jewish-owned restaurants and businesses. Holocaust memorials, surely about the annihilation of Europe’s Jews and not about the modern State of Israel, are now being regularly vandalized across Europe and in the United States.
In the 13 months between October 7 and the 2024 US election, America’s Jewish community expressed growing consternation about the Biden administration’s unwillingness to confront Jew hatred on campus, its insistence on equating antisemitism with Islamophobia, its cultivation of antisemitic movements, and its equivocation over support for Israel in its war on Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
On Election Day, that consternation expressed itself in unprecedented party-switching in states and counties with a high concentration of Jewish population. No, the Jews of Oklahoma didn’t switch sides in droves. But in New York, and other high-intensity Jewish precincts, the numbers were huge.
Yep, naysayers have a point — for many American Jews, neither Israel nor antisemitism are their top priorities. These traditionally socially and politically liberal cohorts stuck with the Ds. But in the Jewish heartland, there was indeed an “exodus.”
Fast forward to 2025, and the Trump administration has dialed the US government’s war on antisemitism, particularly on college campuses, to 11. Deportations of pro-Hamas student protesters, including student visa holders and green card holders, have begun, and with those deportations comes controversy.
It’s important to understand that not all such deportations are alike. Two examples are of particular interest, as they illuminate the controversy:
Mahmoud Khalil: This Syrian-born Columbia grad student and green card holder has become a cause celebre for the Left. The Trump administration has been accused of violating the First Amendment, punishing Khalil for his speech, and targeting him for his prominent role as spokesman for Columbia University’s pro-Hamas encampment. A quick check pulls up dozens of posts from the ACLU, Al Jazeera, various Soviet retread publications, as well as sympathetic portrayals in the mainstream media. Khalil arrogated to himself the spokesman role for Columbia’s encampment, where Hamas literature and pamphlets celebrating the October 7 attacks were distributed. An immigration judge yesterday affirmed the Trump administration’s effort to deport Khalil.
Rumeyza Ozturk: This doctoral student at Tufts is in the United States on a student visa. While she has made clear her views, writing in the student newspaper in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, she nonetheless has done little else to excite the attention of immigration authorities. She was not part of campus pro-Hamas encampments, has no record of links to Hamas, and there appears to be no reason other than the Tufts Daily article to support her detention.
In the case of Khalil, the violations of US immigration law appear manifest. 8 USC 1182, the Immigration and Nationality Act, bars from admission, or authorizes the deportation of any alien (including a resident alien, or green card holder) who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Khalil’s support for Hamas is not in question. The same holds true for a variety of others who have been detained, and whose support for Hamas is not in question.
It is the case of Ozturk that is more troubling, and she has been defended by a variety of Jewish organizations, campus Republicans, and others who cannot be labeled Hamas supporters. Not only is her arrest a matter for concern, her identification as a target must be as well. How did ICE get her name? Why is she being held in Louisiana against the express orders of a Massachusetts judge? Those who support due process are rightly concerned about how this happened, about the absence of due process, and about what the case says about the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for deportation.
But that’s not why we’re here, and the deportations are only a subset of the Trump administration’s jihad against antisemitism on campus. The question is, are they, as former Biden antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt has alleged, a “weaponization of antisemitism”? Or more properly, is the “weaponization of antisemitism” wrong?
One has to wonder where Lipstadt actually was when the Biden administration sat by and virtually ignored Jew hatred’s rise across America. But rather than attack the messenger, her accusation is worth addressing on its merits. And, in fairness, Lipstadt has not been alone in making it. Indeed, numerous Jews who presumably believe they have particular standing to dress down Team Trump, have joined in, here, here, here, and here.
The discussion merits some context: Over some decades now, the Democratic Party has been drifting away from its historic support for the State of Israel. Barack Obama, who quietly loathed the Israeli government, and felt little sympathy for the State of Israel writ large, was merely the apotheosis of that transformation. Similarly, Republicans, bolstered largely not by Jews, but by Evangelical Christians, were over the same period drifting away from their own historical antipathy towards the State of Israel.
In his first administration, Donald Trump not only doubled down on US support for Israel, he reversed his predecessor’s Iran policies, and fostered the first major breakthrough in Israeli-Arab relations in a quarter century. In short, Donald Trump has not come to his support for Israel or for Zionism as a convenient means of abusing Muslims. But there is context there too.
Another element of the first Trump administration was a so-called “Muslim ban.” At the time, Trump sought to bar immigrants and entrants from seven Muslim-majority countries; that order was reversed after extended litigation, and then ultimately affirmed after a favorable Supreme Court decision regarding the President’s authority. But it provides clear context for Trump’s attitudes on the question of the presence of certain Muslims in the United States.
But there’s a weird twist here as well. Because, while we understand correctly that Trump is pro-Israel, pro-Zionist, pro-Jew, and has been accused of being anti-Muslim, we also know that there is a vein of antisemitism and Holocaust denial inside the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. That’s not our focus here, any more than the details of the antisemitism wing of the Democratic Party. It is, however, a strange factoid in the context of the “weaponization” argument. Perhaps, to some, it underscores the cynicism of the philo-semitism Trump also appears to embrace.
None of this context, however, validates the accusation that he is “weaponizing antisemitism” to drive forward his own fascist/authoritarian/bigoted (you choose) agenda. Or, perhaps more fairly, it does not validate anger about the so-called weaponization of antisemitism. Because at the end of the day, the facts in evidence of this weaponization are lawful acts by any US government, and any administration. And where they are not, they will be reversed.
More importantly, the notion that Jews and supporters of Israel should not exert political power and influence to rid their country and its academic institutions of Jew-haters is garbage. American antisemites on the Left and Right are a scourge; foreign antisemites who support terrorist organizations and the murder of Jews are deportable under US law. And we are right to support their deportation.
The argument that Jews should be quiescent about their own rights, and tolerant of antisemitic terror supporters is reminiscent of Holocaust era arguments about the need for Jews to stay under the radar, to not identify themselves too overtly with the war on Nazism; or better still, for the Jews of Europe to quietly accept their fate rather than stand up and loudly demand international support. Screw that.
Antisemites and their fellow travelers in Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran, the United Nations, and throughout European and American campuses must be crushed. There must be a price to be paid for stoking Jew hatred and Jew killing. Jobs must be lost. Visas must be lost. Freedom must be lost. Development assistance must be lost. And taxpayer subsidies must be lost.
Over recent decades, minority groups have effectively weaponized their own status to demand an end to the tolerance of bigotry, whether against Blacks, or Hispanics, or gays, or lesbians, or transpeople. And they are right. The hate-filled diatribes against Jews that have been normalized on campuses and Leftist salons could never be repeated were they about Blacks or other historically discriminated-against minorities.
The Jewish people lost six million in the Holocaust; a million Jews of Arab nations were driven from their homes; tens of thousands of Jews have lost their lives fighting antisemitic Arab and Iranian enemies over the decades. But that’s OK?
The aim should be to ensure that antisemites don’t find a home in American universities; that Jew-haters are wiped from the face of academia; that defenders and supporters of terrorists lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and live in shame. The Civil Rights Act protects Jews as it does others; the Immigration and Nationality Act protects our shores from terror supporters, and any others “detrimental to the interests of the United States."
If using US law to crush the enemies of the Jewish people, and to exclude terror supporters is “weaponizing antisemitism,” I say go for it. Go harder.
"If using US law to crush the enemies of the Jewish people, and to exclude terror supporters is 'weaponizing antisemitism,' I say go for it. Go harder."
How do I get this on a bumper sticker?
While protecting a people from whom much of western culture sprung (along with the ancient Greeks and marauding Romans) is important — especially a people who have contributed so much — one can certainly understand the resentment and envy that lie underneath antisemitism. Resentment and envy are two of the worst emotions in the human composite and must always be beaten out of the ourselves and our society.
One rarely resents or envies the lowest — it is those who contribute much and succeed we wish to question and degrade. But the funny thing about persecution is it produces persecuted people who are stronger, faster, better, and agile. See the Copts in Egypt. See the Jews. They adapted and survived by driving accomplishment with whatever skills and aptitudes they may have to its highest level. That has great value and a lesson for the world.
However there is a geopolitical angle to our support of Israel, and the Jewish people in general. Israel remains the political and oddly enough this tiny country is the beacon of democracy, innovation, and enterprise in the Middle East. Israel strives for the future while so much of the Arab world strives to remain what it thinks it once was.
Imagine if Israel sprung from the desert of Saudi Arabia and sat upon billions of barrels of oil. In fact, Israel is helping tease oil from the eastern Mediterranean, and some of this flows to Lebanon and Egypt, and even Turkey. Oh those Jews, always finding an entrée. What next? A petro-state?
But the point remains, support for Israel (and in reality all Jews) comes with many costs, caveats and conditions, … but there are important benefits and some of those boil down to geopolitical as well as our humane and cultural obligation.
One might say our relationship with Israel is both cooperative and contentious, and they have spied on us (Jonathan Pollard) and sold our secrets. So it is coopentious. Be that as it may, … when our interests align and overlap, there is no better friend and no better cause in the region which has world’s worst traffic jam of traders, exploiters, and traitors.
Primal hatred of one, soon spreads to hatred of others. And it helps if those singled out for persecution due to their DNA or faith, happen to sit astride this zone of friction along the tectonic political plates of the conflict ridden desert lands. They make good allies, if not always friends.