Funny, as an American Jew I can tell you that the issuance of this executive order, which essentially just restates the policy that's long existed — by an administration that routinely propagates anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and xenophobia — does not make me feel safer.
For the last few decades, a certain slice of American Judaism has fixated on campus criticism of Israel as a principal emitter of anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideology. It's true that anti-Israel speech can all too easily veer into anti-Semitism, but that largely happens when critics from the left see all Jews as fundamentally Israeli, as foreign, as other.
Meanwhile, some defenders of Israel have promoted the notion that to criticize Israel is to criticize all Jews, thus creating a kind of feedback loop that only serves divisive forces both in the United States and abroad.
Enter Donald Trump. Since taking office, he has repeatedly hinted at the notion that American Jews are just not real Americans and are instead loyal to Israel. Over the weekend, he went to Florida and told the Israeli-American Council that some American Jews would not risk voting for Elizabeth Warren over Trump because her tax proposals would take away their money.
"You're not going to vote for the wealth tax," he said. "Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away. No, no. Even if you don't like me, some of you don't. Some of you, I don't like at all actually. And you're going to be my biggest supporters because you'd be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it."
He matched his anti-Semitic slur of the greedy Jew with an equally anti-Semitic argument that some American Jews "don't love Israel enough," as if we are required by our Judaism to be loyal to this other country. This is a red flag for American Jews because of the long history of "dual loyalty" allegations that have led to violence against Jews.
This isn't Trump's first offense by far. For example, last April he spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition and referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling the audience that Netanyahu was "your prime minister." American Jews have no prime minister. What they have is an American President who seems fixed on disavowing them, repeatedly suggesting that Israel, not America, is our "true" home.
Many Jews who live in the United States feel great affection for Israel. I've always had deeply conflicted feelings about the country, and I too believe that hate speech is a dangerous precursor to hateful acts.
But even as violence escalates against American Jews, there's little evidence that criticism of Israel on college campuses (including over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement) is a leading vector.
In fact, data from the Anti-Defamation League show that most extremist violence, including but not limited to acts directed at Jews, comes from white supremacists.
Meanwhile, many of the very people who rail against "cancel culture," "trigger warnings," and "safe spaces," on campus, are seeking more tools to silence political opponents. The Trump administration has responded by crafting this executive order, giving them more power to silence left-wing speech on campus. The hypocrisy is obvious, and the specifics worry me.
The executive order states that Title VI doesn't protect Jews because of religion, but only if the discrimination arises from race, color, or national origin. The New York Times article that broke the story Tuesday night, and attributed its reporting to several unnamed administration officials, cast the news as a change to the legal definition of Jews with respect to Title VI as having a shared, non-US national origin. This set off an alarm bells for many and was amplified into an enormous furor online. On Wednesday, when the executive order was made public, we could see that it made more modest claims, creating a kind of backlash to the furor, as news organizations, and Twitter, backpedaled.
But let us not overcorrect here for premature outrage. The order IS worrying: so much depends on how is used by the President's Justice Department. The order sows confusion around whether to treat Jews as belonging to a foreign race, which in fact is a core anti-Semitic talking point.
If applied by this President and his administration against left-wing students ... well, I worry that we've just handed him a tool to stoke division, hate, and make us all less safe.
The executive order offers a new tool for the Trump administration to penalize Jewish critics of Israel as anti-Semites.
Even as the Trump administration announced its executive order, though, American Jews on the left were acting against discrimination and xenophobia elsewhere. On Tuesday, more than 1,000 activists from Never Again Action, at least most of whom were Jews, staged actions in San Diego, Rhode Island, and Missouri, aimed at shutting down facilities associated with immigration enforcement through civil disobedience. They were demanding the simple right to have doctors administer flu vaccines to detained immigrants.
Alyssa Rubin, an organizer for the group, told me, "Trump's executive order makes it clearer than ever why the fight against anti-Semitism and the fight against Trump's immigration policies are the same fight. We know what happens when people are categorized and told that they don't really belong. Never again means we fight as one."
Bagikan Berita Ini
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