U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Chief Kristen Clarke have been notably silent on the issue of campus antisemitism as it has spread in recent weeks, threatening Jewish students.
Garland, who is himself Jewish, vouched for Clarke when she faced a contentious confirmation process as Senators raised concerns about her past, notably when she invited an antisemitic speaker to Harvard as a student in the 1990s.
The U.S. Department of Education has its own Office for Civil Rights that has been opening investigations into several universities for months. But the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been absent from the fight against what is clearly a coordinated effort, masterminded by several national and international groups, and well-funded by shadowy donors. The tactics of the campus encampments are the same; the timing is the same; even many of the tents are the same. And the protests, and the threats to Jews, have spilled well beyond the gates of the campuses into the streets beyond.
NGO Monitor has compiled a list of the known groups behind the ongoing campus disruptions. They include Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP); Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); Within Our Lifetime (WOL); US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR); WESPAC (Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation); and the Samidoun group.
Many of these groups are openly pro-terror; some have links to radical organizations, and Samidoun in particular is considered a terrorist organization in Israel, and has been banned in Germany. Samidoun’s founders spoke to anti-Israel students at Columbia University.
Though the funding for these groups is murky, it has been reported that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the pro-terror JVP.
The anti-Israel protests have arguably violated the civil rights of Jewish students and faculty. A Columbia rabbi told Jewish students to go home for their own safety; many Jewish students feel unsafe on campus there, and elsewhere.
One might think that the DOJ Civil Rights Division would investigate these organizations for federal civil rights violations, and perhaps violations of RICO statutes, while tracking down their donor networks. The so-called “whole of government approach” that the Biden administration champions for other causes ought to bring the DOJ Civil Rights Division together with the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights investigations.
That is, if the Biden administration were taking the problem seriously.
Instead, President Joe Biden equivocates, and Garland is silent, as is Clarke, who spoke only last week at a Holocaust memorial program and failed to mention the campus unrest.
The DOJ is eager to pursue parents showing up at school board meetings to protest Critical Race Theory and radical transgenderism, but somehow absent when it comes to organized, well-funded groups targeting Jews on campus.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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