March 10, 2025

Read on Academe blog

Excerpt: Yesterday, campus communities watched in horror as news unfolded that Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who bravely acted as negotiator between the Palestine solidarity encampment and Columbia administrators, had been snatched from university housing by ICE agents on orders from the White House. It is the cataclysm that has been building on campuses: political speech smeared as “terror support,” students arrested (and perhaps soon faculty and staff) as university leaders instruct us to cooperate and comply. As the Trump regime draws ever more parallel to Nazism, it is impossible not to draw comparisons with the Gestapo. But the Trump regime’s fixers in these attacks are, outrageously, the Anti-Defamation League and a set of smaller related organizations claiming to combat antisemitism. Their claims are just as specious and tactical as Trump’s, but even more dangerous because they speak in the language of civil rights—and university leaders have treated them as good-faith actors. Last week, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual “Never is Now” summit gathered a chilling mix of far-right politicians…