DHS Raids Campus in Search of Terrorist Supporters
Conditioned by years of watching politicians pay empty lip service and renege on their promises, the media and most Americans are continuously shocked at the speed at which President Trump has demonstrated he was not bluffing when he vowed to make sweeping changes across the government.
News outlets can barely keep pace with the flood of his executive orders, mass layoffs, and rapid-fire agency reorganizations. Americans are watching the old order break apart but instead of dissolving into chaos, something new and on many fronts, promising, appears to be taking shape.
One of the latest examples of the astonishing speed of government mobilization under Trump is a series of crackdowns targeting antisemitic “woke” university culture in this country.
Left-wing progressives and their Islamist backers have usurped American higher education to the point where many colleges and universities are intolerably hostile environments for Jews.
President Trump’s “counteroffensive” began with punitive measures against Columbia University for its “continued inaction” to reign in campus antisemitism, with administration officials announcing that some 60 universities across the nation would be investigated for similar failures.
In the wake of repeated violent protests at Columbia and Barnard College, the Trump administration had announced that it would pursue foreign inciters of antisemitism and those guilty of “pro-terror, antisemitic, anti-American activity.”
The president pledged to strip these agitators of their student visas or green cards and ship them back to their native countries. ICE’s arrest of pro-Hamas ringleader Mahmoud Khalil the same week marked the first step in the fulfillment of that pledge.
A Palestinian-Syrian known as the mastermind behind Columbia’s violent takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last April, and a key agitator who fueled the pro-Hamas “tent encampments,” Khalil made no secret of his corrosive anti-Israel ideology and Jew-hatred. He also led the campus Marxist group “CUAD” that calls for the eradication of Western civilization. [See Sidebar]
In addition to detaining Khalil, ICE arrested another foreign student involved in pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia.
Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman from the West Bank, was taken into custody by local law enforcement last year “for her involvement in pro-Hamas protests and for overstaying her twice-canceled visa,” reported the NY Post. Released on bail, she had managed to evade further proceedings until last week’s arrest.
DHS Raids Columbia
With these arrests, the Trump administration was just getting started.
To identify pro-Hamas student leaders and materials at Columbia University, as well as illegal immigrants the university might be sheltering, the Department of Homeland Security agents executed search warrants on the property last Thursday night.
The raid spurred interim president Katrina Armstrong to inform the entire student body of 34,700 of the search. “I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal DHS agents searching two University residences last night,” Armstrong wrote, assuring the students that “no items were removed and no further action taken.”
Armstrong did not need to spell out the message the raid sent to Columbia’s leadership and student body, one that undoubtedly echoed across all American campuses: harboring pro-Hamas agitators or foreign students whose visas have been revoked will carry consequences.
The string of enforcement actions by the Trump administration against Columbia and student inciters came two days after last week’s pro-Hamas student riot that violently broke into and occupied a Columbia university building.
During the takeover, rioters assaulted a security guard, vandalized the property, chanted antisemitic slurs and defied the NYPD’s orders to vacate.
The lawbreakers showed that nothing had changed at Columbia since it became the epicenter of anti-Israel and antisemitic riots last spring. The toxic environment of Jew-baiting had approached anarchy around Pesach, when the students were advised by a Jewish professor to leave the campus as the university could not protect them.
Khalil, who represented the rioters during that incident, arrogantly issuing their demands to Columbia’s administration, currently remains behind bars in Louisiana awaiting deportation, as his attorneys seek to block the government from expelling him.
Students On Visas and Green Cards Advised to Keep Low Profile
The two arrests along with the government’s announcing the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants to Columbia, and a third bombshell issuing ultimatums to the Ivy League school (reported on below), “have sent shockwaves across American campuses,” reports CNN in an article headlined “The Rules Are Changing,”
“International students, particularly those on visas and green cards, are terrified of what might happen to them if they exercise their free speech rights,” explained the article. “At Columbia, which has nearly 24,000 international students [out of a student body of almost 35,000], the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic is advising foreign students to keep a low profile to avoid the attention of the Trump administration.”
(All students from Arab countries receive full tuition subsidies from rich Arab governments such as Qatar, a fact that plays a significant role in Columbia’s student recruitment goals.
Middle Eastern students, except those from Israel, do not receive scholarships or student loans from the university. With tuition reaching up to $136,000 a year, the enrollment of students from Arab countries is highly profitable; the loss of such revenue would constitute a significant blow to Columbia.)
International students as well as those who are undocumented or have “tenuous immigration status” now fear what might happen to them,” the director of the Clinic said. “Activities [read anti-Israel riots] that were taken for granted just a week ago are now up for grabs. Students are asking, ‘Should I do this? Should I do that? What are the risks?’”
The liberal media and left-wing mouthpieces are laboring to hype up the “danger” to foreign students, particularly in Ivy League institutions, casting Trump as an evil fascist who is bent on depriving them of their civil rights. These anti-Trump elements are using the arrest of Palestinian troublemaker Khalil to ignite campus unrest.
“I think the attack on free speech we’re seeing right now is mobilizing people in a way that the genocide in Gaza or the West Bank never has, which is really unfortunate,” a Harvard student told CNN.
One can’t miss the grand irony of the sharp u turn liberals make—from arguing that “speech is a form of violence” (when conservatives disagree with them) to glorifying hateful speech that explicitly threatens lives.
The same mobs who wanted you punished for making a woke student on a college campus feel “unsafe” by using the wrong pronoun for him, become self-righteous defenders of free speech when it concerns a hate-spewing bigot.
Over 150 of these delusional defenders of the First Amendment stormed inside Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan on Friday to demand Khalil’s release. The demonstration, led by a radical left-wing group calling itself “Jewish Voice for Peace,” saw almost 100 of their members arrested after refusing police orders to leave. [See Sidebar]
Trump To Columbia: Comply or Lose All Federal Funding
Earlier this month, the Trump administration had cancelled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia and the reassessment of another $5 billion in additional funds, in response to the university’s failure to protect its Jewish students—a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
As Columbia’s leadership sought to appease the government by publishing a list of punishments it intended to mete out to anti-Israel rioters arrested last spring, Trump signaled such actions were too little too late.
Slapping a list of ultimatums on the university on Thursday that called for sweeping changes, Trump threatened to permanently end federal funding to the Ivy League school unless it complies with the new requirements.
In a letter sent by the federal authorities, Columbia was warned that talks on its financial future would only take place if it places its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership [under the oversight of someone outside the university] for a minimum of five years,” AP reported.
Before any “formal negotiations” can be held, the Ivy League institution must also ban masks on campus “meant to conceal the wearer’s identity or intimidate others,” the letter detailed.
In addition, the university must adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which prohibits demonizing Israel as a “racist” entity and calling for its destruction; inciting violence against Jews; and holding Israel and Jewish people to standards that are not imposed on any other nation.
Feds Demand Columbia Reform Its Discipline, Admissions Protocols
The list of federal requirements also calls for Columbia to abolish its current ineffectual “process for disciplining students,” and deliver a plan to “reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices.”
“We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps,” officials from the Department of Education, General Services Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services wrote.
The action against Columbia marks a dramatic step in President Trump’s attempts to reshape how universities across the country deal with antisemitism and the demonizing of Israel. The ultimatums left administrators of other Ivy League schools stunned, reported the Boston Globe.
“Students and administrators alike at Harvard and MIT were left slack-jawed after the Trump administration took extraordinary measures to widen its crackdown on universities during a frenetic four-day blitz,” the article said.
It noted that that the Department of Education put 60 colleges and universities on notice that “they, too, could face sanctions if they do not comply with federal civil rights laws.”
Administration officials have warned that these funding cuts and disciplinary measures were just the beginning of a crackdown on schools that fail to protect their Jewish students. “More cuts are on the way, they said.
Critics at Columbia slammed the government for interfering in the internal management of the university, reported AP. Responding to the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia, Joseph Howley, a classics professor at the University, was quoted as insisting they were “insane.”
“Half of this stuff you can’t just do and the other half is insane!” Howley expostulated. “If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured, then we don’t have universities in this country.”
The professor was apparently triggered over Columbia finally being held accountable for its egregious violations of the civil rights of its Jewish students. No doubt he’d be happier if college administrators were allowed to either continue greenlighting antisemitic violence or denying it exists—all while still receiving lavish federal funding.
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Seething With Hatred
Anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil “seethed with hatred” for the Jewish state, according to a former classmate who told the NY Post he was an “insidious” presence at Columbia University.
“It was so clear that the thing driving him most in life is destroying Israel and everyone in it and anyone who supports it, including most Jews … That to me was scary, that something could consume you like that,” the first-year student said.
She said Khalil routinely “targeted” Jewish students in a social media group chat the class shared. “Once or twice a week, he would instigate crazy claims on the group chat that were very antisemitic and inflammatory, and would get into fights with people,” she recounted.
The student, reading from a series of texts on her phone, told the NY Post that a fellow Jewish student shared that he was disturbed by the “insane amount of antisemitism spewed in this chat in the last few months, and found it shameful.”
According to NY Post interviewee, Khalil fired back with, ‘Thank you for conflating Judaism and Zionism. This is exactly what some are trying to do, to make it easier for them to shut down any criticism of the genocidal state of Israel.’
The student said Khalil’s behavior was so menacing it drove her to drop the class, although she didn’t dare confront him, fearing to “become a target,” she told the NY Post.
She said she filed Title VI complaints with Columbia administrators about his antisemitic rants within the group chat, as did several other Jewish students.
“There have been so many reports filed against him,” the young woman noted. “[Khalil] was not in compliance with academic standards but they never held him accountable for his Jew-hating actions. They bent over backwards to not expel him.”
The student shared her feeling of “a great weight lifted” from her upon discovering that Khalil had been arrested and removed from the campus. “I felt relief knowing he was gone,” she told the Post.
Khalil’s arrest has become a lightning rod for anti-Israel protesters who called for cross-country demonstrations to demand his release and his right to “freedom of speech.”
“These mobs have vandalized the home of Columbia University‘s president; stormed the dining area of Trump Tower, and rallied outside Federal Plaza Immigration Court, “all while calling for Khalil’s freedom and spewing antisemitic hatred,” reports the NY Post.
Administration officials emphasize that this case is not about censoring controversial speech or ideology. It concerns a non-citizen supporting or promoting terrorist groups or activities—an act that is illegal and provides grounds for revoking the person’s student visa or green card.
Speaking on Face the Nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the argument that Khalil was simply expressing a political viewpoint. This individual, he said, was not merely a participant in student protests. “He was a spokesperson and negotiator for a movement that turned a prestigious university into chaos.”
Rubio made it clear that Khalil’s visa revocation was just the beginning. “We’re going to do more,” he said. “Every day now, we are approving visa revocations. And if that visa led to a green card, that process will be revoked as well.”
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The Colossal Fraud Behind “Jewish Voices for Peace”
President Trump last week mocked Sen. Chuck Schumer for being “more Palestinian than Jewish,” alluding to recent instances where the Senate Democrat majority leader put politics and personal interest over his allegiance to Israel and the Jewish people.
Schumer notoriously supported former President Biden’s decision to withhold from Israel much needed ammunition when Israeli forces were about to enter Rafah to destroy Hamas’ leadership.
In another act that was deemed a betrayal of Jewish interests, a House Oversight Committee report noted that Schumer advised Columbia’s former president Shafik to refrain from taking concrete action to stem rampant antisemitism at the university, because it is “only a Republican issue.”
“Schumer used to be Jewish but he became Palestinian,” Trump commented drily at a press conference.
The president might have said the same about a fringe group claiming to be Jewish that labors to weaken and do damage to Israel. Jewish Voices for Peace, whose members stormed Trump Tower last week and were arrested in droves, have proved to be even more traitorous than the senator.
JVP provides a deceptive Jewish façade to the demonization of Israel; takes pride in its virulently anti-Israel agenda; and aligns itself with the dregs of humanity who seek the annihilation of the Jewish people.
The group partners with antisemites of all stripes in inciting hatred of Israel, and has posted sick messages online that justify the barbaric Hamas massacres of Oct. 7 as acts of “liberation.”
Backed by the George Soros “Open Societies Foundation,” which uses its vast wealth to support radical left-wing causes worldwide, this hateful group parrots accusations of genocide against Israel, and calls on the U.S. government to withdraw its support for the Jewish state.
At the rallies they organize to vilify Israel, JVP members behave like lunatics, screaming incitement against the Jewish state and championing its arch enemies.
The group recently shared on its website a classic blood libel cartoon that showcases its true character, a classic antisemitic hate group that is Jewish in name only.
The cartoon conjured up the notorious Jewish blood libel of the Middle Ages, dressed up in a modern-day context that depicts Israeli soldiers toasting each other with the blood of Palestinian victims.
Blood libels have historically led to centuries of horrific massacres against innocent Jews and destruction of their communities across Europe.
That a group calling itself Jewish would promote the type of imagery that has incited so much hatred and savagery against Jews unmasks the despicable fraud behind JVP’s self-identification as “Jewish,” let alone “voices for peace.”
