Antisemitism Witch Hunt Coming to a School Near You
Bringing fascism to the US in the name of protecting Jews
I went to a rally last week on a local campus in support of student activists arrested and imprisoned for supporting Palestine. Students from five different universities spoke.
Do you know why I don’t have their names or their pictures? It’s because they all felt they must be anonymous, to avoid persecution. They also wore masks as an additional measure to protect themselves from arrest and/or deportation. A student from Sacramento State University told this story:
A few months ago, students held a dinner and Palestinian cultural evening to raise money for food, water and medical supplies for the besieged people of Gaza. The event was a big success. A few days later, seven Sac State faculty members complained to the Department of Education (DoE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) that the event was raising money for a terrorist organization.
OCR immediately launched an investigation of “antisemitism” at Sac State. They sent a letter to President Luke Wood calling pro-Palestinian students “malcontents,” and “antisemitic antagonists,” accusing them of “denying Jewish students equal access to programs,” and “harassing and committing violence against Jewish students.”
The letter — which you can read at the above link — went on like that, without giving a single specific for any of these charges. The absence of evidence is unsurprising, as no “harassment or violence” happened at Sac State or any other campus of which I am aware. Apparently, raising money to feed starving children constitutes antisemitic harassment, because it made these Jewish professors uncomfortable.
False charges of antisemitism have become a 21st Century witch hunt. According to a CNN report of March 10, over 60 colleges are now being investigated for antisemitism. The number keeps growing, because Israel-sponsored groups like Canary Mission and Betar US are recruiting Jewish faculty and students to make complaints like the Sac State faculty made.
The Trump administration, immediately responds by launching “investigations,” often threatening loss of Federal funding.
How the antisemitism panic is a witch hunt
In the medieval witch hunts, thousands of women (and a few men) were accused of witchcraft or being in alliance with the devil. They were tortured, hung, or burned at the stake based on allegations of doing unspecified harm, without supporting evidence. Often the victims were midwives and healers who knew herbal medicine, or people who had conflicts with local political or religious leaders.
Women would often go to their deaths without ever finding out what they had supposedly done.
The witch hunts were among the darkest period of Europe’s dark history. A guide in the Library of Congress says women accused of witchcraft were often “marginalized people, including spinsters, widows, those without male protectors, healing women, or those who deviated from societal norms, such as being independent or outspoken.”
In some places, like Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, witch hunts became a madness which spread to much of the population. Today’s false antisemitism mania shares many of those features. It’s a madness spreading around the Western world, driven by malign actors whose goals are personal and political and have nothing to do with protecting Jews.
The witch hunts first and foremost serve to protect Israel from criticism and promote Israeli and American war agendas. Canary Mission and Betar US have been doing this for years: doxxing Palestine supporters, keeping them from getting jobs or school admissions.
In the Trump era of immigrant hatred and all-out support for Israel’s wars, the witch hunters have a pipeline to government to spread their stories.
The administration loudly frames all opposition to Israel as antisemitism and all nonwhite immigrants as potential terrorists.
The antisemitism hunt is indeed spreading like the medieval witch hunts. On April 5, Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted that 300 foreign born students had had their visas revoked and faced deportation for supporting Palestine, and therefore being antisemitic. Rubio promised more revocations to come.
The administration loudly frames all opposition to Israel as antisemitism and all nonwhite immigrants as potential terrorists.
The administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has begun dictating to universities who they can hire (no Diversity or Inclusion!) and what they can and can’t teach, and cancelling billions in funding for schools, like Harvard, who refuse to go along.
How the hunt came to Sacramento State
In 2024, when the student encampments for Gaza started, Sacramento State’s large, militant encampment pressured the school to stop investing in Israel. Sac State revised its investment policies in May, to favor “socially responsible investment strategies” and “avoid direct investments in companies that profit from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or activities that violate fundamental human rights.”
This concession to the protestors is what really motivated the investigation of Sac State, but the DoE continues to frame it as a reaction to “antisemitism.” In their letter to Sac State president Luke Wood, the OCR wrote, “The United States has endured an eruption of antisemitic activity, primarily in educational institutions… Americans watched in shock as mobs of campus malcontents erected encampments, occupied buildings and spat on, harassed, assaulted and blocked Jewish students from going to class.”
I repeat: None of this is true. No Jewish students were assaulted or harassed for being Jewish at Sacramento State. The students whom OCR calls “malcontents” were people trying to stop ongoing mass murder. OCR’s investigation wasn’t going anywhere. When the Sac State community had their cultural evening for Gaza, it gave the witch-hunters a chance to renew their pressure.
This is how fascism starts
The antisemitism witch hunt started with those who support Palestine, but it has already moved beyond them to another marginalized group, immigrants of color. The government has started attacking immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. Some estimate the number of revoked visas is now over 1,000, including many who are not activists for Palestine at all. We have all seen what government is doing to Latin American immigrants. Lucky ones are deported; others imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or in El Salvador.
The Department of Homeland Security announced last week that it will begin “screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.” (Remember: “antisemitism” is being used as code for “opposition to Israeli and American wars.”)
The attack on education is classic fascist strategy. They don’t want people thinking for themselves or hearing unapproved ideas. Certainly, the government’s demands on universities go far beyond ‘only’ stopping demonstrations.
Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon told CNBC that she had already advised Columbia’s acting President to “vet international students and to look at faculty and what they were teaching” to “see whether they were encouraging unrest.”
Here we can see the right-wing playbook for the witch hunt. Create a non-specific danger, in this case ‘antisemitism.’ (Before that, it was ‘terrorism.’) They don’t need to provide evidence, just provoke fear. Then use the fear to justify attacks on education, peace activists, immigrants, labor organizers, indigenous leaders and other outsiders, then to take from all the people any rights they find inconvenient.
Notice that the people demanding that schools suppress “antisemitism” are usually Christian nationalists or others who have been anti-Jewish for ages. They make Nazi salutes. They may subscribe to Great Replacement Theory or believe Jews are out to subvert Christian culture. They may be Christian Zionists who want to move all Jews to Israel to bring about the Second Coming. But if anyone says anything against Israel, those people become Jew-haters who must be suppressed.
Despite its powerful backers, the witch hunt may not work. Even liberal supporters of Israel in the US think it has gone too far. Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a pro-Israel group, told National Public Radio: “When loud voices are trying to exploit concerns around antisemitism to advance their broader reactionary, extremist agenda, we need to understand what’s happening there.” And California State Senator Scott Wiener posted a video in which he condemned false antisemitism charges spread by the Right (though he himself has made such charges in the past.)
Like the European women healers, Palestinians and their supporters don’t have to do anything wrong to be suppressed.
As the nameless Palestinian student from Sacramento State University said, “The crime of Palestinians will always be their lives. It won’t be what they say or what they do, what they wear or where they live. We see now that the only crime when accused by Israel or its supporters is being Palestinian.” Probably the women burned at the stake in the witch hunts felt the same way.
The European witch hunts set social life in Europe back 500 years [my estimate.] Highlighting nonexistent threats, whether of witchcraft or antisemitism, is an important way authoritarians win support for locking down a society. We must debunk these charges whenever we encounter them.
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