“It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
So states an executive order signed this week by President Trump, allotting all US department and agency heads 60 days to come up with meaningful new ways to fight the rise in anti-Jewish incidents in America.
Should these officials need of inspiration, the order also refers to existing immigration laws, which permit the immediate deportation of any resident alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or supports a terrorist organization.”
It hardly takes a seasoned lawyer to realize the order’s implications: Non-citizens — including resident aliens or foreign nationals here on a student visa — who’ve spent the past year marching and waving the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, or other groups designated by the US Department of State as terrorist organizations may soon find themselves with a one-way ticket back home.
It’s a policy I first suggested nearly a year ago.
Like clockwork, the president’s critics rose to declare their opposition.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 campuses nationwide, called it the “most irresponsible public policy” he had ever witnessed and called for the order’s reversal.
As an academic, I welcome every defense of the First Amendment. But this one, alas, is misguided: As the scholar Ilya Shapiro noted recently, “it’s properly the job — the duty — of the government to screen out visitors and migrants who could be harmful to our country.”
Case law, too, is thick with instances of immigration judges revoking visa status based on an individual’s support for terrorism.
None of this is difficult to understand, and the administration deserves a round of applause for doing its most basic job and upholding the law.
We should cheer this move not only because it symbolizes a return to order and sanity — both direly needed after four years of lawlessness and coddled marchers shouting “death to America” and advocating jihad against Jews.
The order, we can only hope, will also force academic institutions to address their maddening transformation from seats of learning to swamps of hate and propaganda.
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Despite a wave of highly publicized congressional hearings — which resulted in the resignations of the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and Columbia — our ivory towers remain mired in malice. Just last month, for example, Columbia hosted an “art exhibit” celebrating Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacres.
Masked marauders continue to march into classes uninterruptedly, terrorizing Jewish students.
The school’s administration continues to respond with weakly worded statements.
Trump’s executive order can — and, likely, will — put a quick end to all that.
How? We can imagine, for example, the Department of Justice (DOJ) taking over civil rights investigations previously languishing within the Department of Education.
The DOJ will make clear that singling out Jews for harassment and intimidation will no longer be met with toothless investigations, but with swift and decisive punishment.
We can also imagine Congress doubling down on its hearings, once again summoning the university presidents and demanding they do their share to protect students and cultivate viewpoint diversity.
And, of course, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency can and should explore the vast expenditures of tax-payer money awarded to private universities in the form of contracts and grants.
Columbia, to name but one egregious example, received nearly $6 billion over the last five years from the US government.
Finally, there’s Qatar. For the past two decades, the Qataris — Hamas’s chief sponsors — have contributed more than $4.7 billion to American universities, making them the largest donor to American higher education.
This kind of influence is unconscionable, especially when it comes from a nation that continues to support a host of America’s sworn enemies.
Deporting terrorists may be a good first stop, but we also need to defund and rid colleges of Islamist terrorist monies.
Let us hope that Trump’s executive order is the first step in a long and much-needed process of reform — starting with possible deportations and ending with antisemitism no longer tolerated in American academia.
Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
