An announcement from the U.S. Justice Department, released in late February, said 10 campuses will soon be visited by the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The task force was created by an executive order signed by President Trump.
The campuses listed are Columbia University; George Washington University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California.
The task force will be led by attorney Leo Terrell, best known as a longtime Fox News analyst. He was appointed by President Trump to a senior position within the civil rights division at the Justice Department.
In a Fox News interview about the task force, Terrell said campus perpetrators will be held responsible for “horrific acts” committed against Jewish Americans.
“We're going to use every tool to eradicate this. This is going to stop,” Terrell vowed.
Terrell pointed out that one of the schools, Columbia, has been punished by the Trump administration already. The university learned last week it is losing $400 million in federal funds, including grants and contracts.
Naya Lekht, a scholar on Jewish history, exposes antisemitism and promotes Zionism at the Institute for Global Studies of Anti-Semitism and Policy. She tells AFN her concern is the task force will fail to punish the schools beyond threatening them over Title IV, which is federal funding for higher ed.
“And we have seen that Title IV doesn't really work so effectively for antisemitism,” she says. “It just doesn't seem to protect Jewish individuals."
What the task force must accomplish, she insists, is to punish the faculty members who permitted, and even led, pro-Hamas ideology on their campus.
"That's what I want them to investigate,” she says. “I want them to investigate how these faculty and student groups are violating academic codes, not necessarily looking at Jewish individuals and how they have been discriminated against, but rather looking at the perpetrators."
Columbia University is now in the news for more than losing federal dollars. A student protest leader named Mahmoud Khalil is now facing deportation back to Syria for his role as a pro-Hamas protest organizer.
Khalil’s arrest over the weekend, ordered by the State Department, came after President Trump promised to crack down on the anti-Jewish campus protests and the “terrorist sympathizers” who led them.
