Trump Tackles the Universities

 This article first appeared in Times of Israel Blogs.

One of President Trump’s executive orders is targeting foreign students who are supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas on campus and engaging in disruptive and anti-Semitic activity. The intent is to withdraw student visas from such troublemakers and send them home. As far as that is concerned, I applaud this move.

A word of caution, however. It would be a mistake to assume that all or even most of the students who are fomenting all this anti-Jewish hate and disruption on our campuses in support of Hamas are foreign students. In my own experience at the University of California at Irvine, one of the academic hot spots in our country, during the time I taught there part-time from 1998-2016, most of the students I encountered at the anti-Israel events were either American-born or came to the US as children. The reason I state this is not because I did individual research on the students, but rather because most of them spoke English with no detectable accent.

On the other hand, many of the students, as many as one-half, that I taught (English as a second language) were from the Middle East, chiefly the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. These students’ study in the US was funded by their countries-particularly Saudi Arabia- and they were sponsored by their diplomatic missions like the Saudi embassy in Washington DC and in our case, the  Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. I know for a fact that during my time at UC Irvine, these students were under instructions from their consulate not to get involved in this campus activism against Israel. From my personal observation, they followed those instructions. I did not see them at any of the events I observed.

As for Students in Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is mentioned in this article from Daily Caller: I consider them a despicable organization. Through their tactics of disruption and bullying of Jewish students, they have demonstrated they have no place on any college campus. Yet, I think it would be a mistake to assume they are all foreign citizens. While many if not most come from Arab or other majority Muslim national origins, it is my belief that they are mostly US citizens, including non-Muslims and even some misguided Jews.

I do believe strongly that our incoming Justice Department should tackle the problem of anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas agitators on our campuses. I believe that crimes are being committed that violate the civil rights of Jewish students and are in support of Hamas, that these activities are coordinated across the country, and are not spontaneous (read-conspiracy).

I believe the Trump administration, the Justice Department, and the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights will do whatever they can to deal with this problem. Trump put universities on notice during his first term that universities who refused to protect their Jewish students risked losing federal money. This goes beyond the issue of free speech. But we should not assume that there are going to be quick roundups and deportations and that the problems on our campuses will be solved. This is going to be a long process that involves many people who hold US citizenship. As I said, in my view, we are dealing with conspiracies across state lines to deprive Jewish students of their civil rights and to support Hamas-a US-designated terrorist organization, and it is not just students. This will require a complex investigation. If it has not already started, the time to begin is now.