Columbia University has now caved to President Donald Trump’s bullying, and one of its student protesters has fallen into a Kafkaesque immigration black hole. At least two other students, from Columbia and Cornell University, have been hunted by immigration authorities after they too criticized Israel. Trump says these are victories in a crusade to protect Jewish people.
How (not) to keep Jews safe
President Donald Trump’s anti-antisemitism crusade should make everyone nervous.
March 26, 2025 The Washington Post
In reality, Trump has made Jewish Americans — among other historically persecuted peoples — far less safe.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim to be combating antisemitism while coddling avowed antisemites. Multiple senior Trump aides have embraced the antisemitic “great replacement theory” and delivered Nazi salutes (or rather, harmless waves that so closely resemble Nazi salutes that even self-proclaimed Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes called them “excessive”). Administration officials have also lately canoodled with Germany’s Holocaust-downplaying far-right party, with Elon Musk urging Germans to get over their country’s “past guilt” already.
One senior Trump official at the Pentagon recently amplified neo-Nazi conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by an antisemitic mob in Atlanta a century ago. (The case helped lead to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.)
And of course Trump himself has often played footsie with white supremacists, flattering them as “fine people” who should “stand back and stand by.”
In such context, Trump’s invocation of anti-antisemitism as a rationale to punish Columbia and its students (nearly a quarter of whom are Jewish) seems disingenuous at best. Stripping $400 million in financial aid, grants and research opportunities from the university is likely to hurt many more Jewish students than it helps.
More important, as Jews and other historically persecuted groups have learned, the best protection against oppression and violence is a commitment to a free society that respects civil rights, rule of law and due process.
These are all being denied to Trump’s perceived enemies, including Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil is a former student leader of Columbia’s Gaza protests as well as a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen. He is being detained for deportation because the government objects to his (protected) speech about Israel.
Prosecutors have tacitly acknowledged as much. After initially accusing Khalil of supporting Hamas without evidence, last week the government amended its complaint against him. Now it claims he engaged in “willful misrepresentation” when submitting his green-card application last year. The specific “misrepresentation” alleged? Incompletely filling out a list of recent jobs and club affiliations, including by leaving out membership in a United Nations organization.
In other words: technicalities.
Whether you like Khalil or agree with his views is beside the point. The fact that he’s being punished for his views is what should terrify everyone, especially members of groups that have been persecuted for their beliefs. A society that punishes minorities and dissidents for their convictions — whether banal or inflammatory, agreeable or odious — is not a society in which Jews are safe.
These are not the only actions from this administration that might cause some to hear broken glass.
The president has, without evidence, arbitrarily labeled members of disfavored ethnicities as gang members or terrorists and then shackled and shipped them to a brutal Salvadoran prison without trial. Trump’s allies in government and right-wing media argue that due process allowing them to prove their innocence is unnecessary. Inconvenient, even.
But absence of due process is how you get lynchings, pogroms and other state-sanctioned violence. (Not to mention serious government mistakes, such as confusing a makeup artist for a hardened gangster, as has apparently happened to one of the Venezuelan asylum seekers Trump sent to El Salvador.)
Chillingly, the administration has also reveled in the public humiliation of disfavored groups. Last month, for instance, the White House posted a video of immigrants being frog-marched in chains, with a gleeful caption referring to “ASMR” (the tingling, pleasurable feeling some people feel when hearing soft sounds). More recently, Trump officials praised propaganda videos showing those sent to El Salvador slapped around and forced to their knees, as their heads were forcibly sheared.
A friend recently shared a quote along the lines of, “How can someone be on the wrong side of history when history is repeating? They’re failing an open-book test.” I have been pondering this lately, as federal tax authorities consider handing over immigrants’ records to enforcement agencies (sound familiar?) and states contemplate making it a crime to “harbor or hide” undocumented immigrants. (In an attic, perhaps?) And especially when the president speaks of immigrants and others he dislikes as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
These state actions should disturb any American but particularly those of us from groups that have been targeted for oppression in the past and that fear rising (bipartisan) bigotry today. The way to keep Jews — and any other people — safe is to champion freedom and dignity for all.