Obama urges universities to fight Trump’s crackdown on campus anti-Semitism
Barack Obama, who since his term in the White House ended regularly has pushed himself into the news cycle, is going for headlines again, this time encouraging law firms and universities to fight President Donald Trump’s crackdown on anti-Semitism and weaponization of the government.
During a recent speech he cited Trump’s efforts to eliminate anti-Semitism in public education systems, where pro-Palestinian violence has become common.
A report at the Washington Examiner explains that Trump has been pulling federal funding from schools where anti-Semitism is allowed “to foment” during those episodes of violence.
“Several students in the United States on green cards have also been arrested due to the Trump administration’s accusations that they have supported terrorists and participated in pro-Hamas activity,” the report said, citing the Gaza-based terror organization.
Speaking at New York’s Hamilton College, Obama claimed that the Trump administration’s efforts to curb anti-Semitism, which has included calls for Israel to be eliminated, is an “attack on First Amendment rights,” the report said.
He said schools aren’t doing enough to fight Trump’s agenda, and he is “deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech.”
He warned, “If you are a university, you may have to say … ‘Are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?’ If not, and you’re just being intimidated, you should be able to say, ‘Well, that’s why we’ve got this big endowment. You know, we’ll stand up for what we believe in, and we’ll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment, and we’ll give up the extra wing or the fancy gymnasium.'”
In some cases, Jewish students were banned from parts of their own university campuses by pro-Palestinian radicals.
In fact, Harvard, Columbia University and UCLA have admitted their work to fight anti-Semitism had failed and they have developed new strategies to protect Jewish students.
He also complained that some of the country’s “leading law firms,” including the long anti-Trump Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which were identified by the White House as weaponizing the legal system against conservatives and Trump, now have negotiated with Trump to be restored to his “good graces.”
In fact, all they did was pledge to “be fair and nonpartisan for all” and to represent the “full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society…”
Trump’s move simply was to say that government contracts cannot go to law firms that had weaponized the justice system again conservatives or pro-lifers.
Obama said those corporations might have to “lose some business” in order to maintain their ideologies.