Confronting Campus Anti-Semitism while Preserving Freedom of Speech

April 11 2024

On Friday, campus police arrested nineteen students at California’s highly selective Pomona College when they stormed the offices of the college president during an anti-Israel protest. Meanwhile, Harvard decided to give around-the-clock protection to the “apartheid wall”—a row of posters with anti-Israel slogans—just a few months after it told Jewish students not to leave a menorah on the quad overnight since it could be vandalized.

The lesson from these two cases is that universities have considerable leeway in how they deal with the wave of vicious anti-Israel activism on their campuses, and with the anti-Semitism and harassment of Jewish students that have accompanied it. And when university administrations fail, there are ways that the government can step in without infringing on students’ or colleges’ freedom of speech. Peter Cordi spoke with three First Amendment experts about why this is so. The bottom line was expressed by Jeffrey Robbins:

Robbins explained that the matter comes down to two main principles; one being that speech is protected, and the other being that the speech and conduct “is in fact intended to hurt Jews and to drive a wedge between them and their identity.” He noted that there is a point when otherwise protected speech creates a hostile environment and can subject people or schools to liability under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. . . .

Robbins said the response to disruptions of university or college events “should be a no-brainer,” and argued that “if a university or college is serious about dealing with this stuff, then those people [disrupting events and classes] should be expelled.”

When anti-Semitic incidents go unpunished, Robbins said, “This implies something nefarious; that universities and colleges lack the guts or the will when it comes to Jewish students to enforce the rules that you just know they would not have to be pressured into enforcing if it were other groups.”

When universities who have been warned but have not addressed the issue are sued and have to “cough up damages,” he argued, “You may see them acting in a totally different way. And that is the kind of lawsuit which it seems to me needs to be explored. Quickly.”

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Anti-Semitism, Freedom of Speech, Israel on campus

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023