trump biden

 

Last year, Columbia University turned Jewish students into fugitives on their own campus. Need to study? Call an escort. Want to avoid the anti-Israel mob? Sneak through a back door. The “Safe Passage Liaison” wasn’t protection—it was a surrender to antisemites who faced no consequences for turning swaths of campus into no-go zones for Jews.  

Columbia protected the antisemites more than they protected the Jews - the antisemites had no restrictions on their movement. Yet this  “Safe Passage Liaison” was framed as a way of defending Jews.

That travesty is emblematic of President Biden’s approach to antisemitism: bubble-wrap the victims, not battle the hate. 

He signed generic acts against hate crimes. He condemned antisemitic incidents. It was almost all talk. Perhaps the most pro-active thing he did to combat antisemitism was not original to him - he supported Trump's previous executive order asserting that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits antisemitic and related discrimination in federally funded programs.

Biden's crowning achievement ostensibly against Jew-hatred was the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. But it was a failure before it started, not even defining antisemitism. It couldn’t even specify the enemy it claimed to fight.

The focus of the national strategy was passive and defensive - raising awareness, protecting Jewish communities and institutions, fostering cross-community solidarity. DEI was considered a solution for antisemitism, not part of the problem. 

Compare the situation at Columbia University only nine months ago with Columbia now. Columbia is now in the news due to the Trump administration cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of funding because Columbia did little to actually allow Jews to have equal rights on campus - the simple right to walk on campus and to gather in groups without fear. The Trump administration is going after the ringleaders of the antisemitic protests. (Yes, "resistance by all means necessary" and "globalize the intifada" are barely veiled dog-whistles to murder Jews.) 

Biden's efforts were nearly all about protecting Jews at a time when antisemites will always find new ways to attack. Trump's efforts are to go after the antisemites -  against the specific people who make the lives of Jews on campus hell. 

While Biden's focus was "hate," Trump's is antisemitism. He recognizes that not all hate is the same. Watering down attacks on Jews as another form of discrimination does not fight antisemitism at all. It arguably worsens antisemitism because it leans on a "oppressor" and "oppressed" dichotomy that invariably slots Jews as the oppressors (and the people of color who attack Jews as the oppressed.)

Trump's methods are not subtle. They are a sledgehammer. They may hurt people who are not the targets of the actions. Some of the criticisms of Trump's blunt methods have some validity. 

But for Jews who are embattled on campus, and by extension in the entire country, the way Trump attacks antisemitism allows us to begin to breathe again. 

Whether most Jews recognized it or not, contently being on the defensive and knowing that the people who want you dead are protected by the same leaders who pledge to defend you was suffocating. There was nothing the Democratic Party would ever do that would put today's antisemites on the defensive, and the Jew haters knew this quite well. They could take over campus buildings and other areas with impunity, covering their faces, knowing that there is almost no chance that they would be punished or expelled. 

Under Trump, the dynamic has changed. When he says he wants to protect Jews, that means going after the antisemites. 

They are the ones who are afraid now, and that is how it should be.