DOJ Launches Task Force To Fight Antisemtism

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Despite a concerted effort to root out systems that have ingrained Cultural Marxism in institutions of government like critical race theory, DEI, and pro-LGBT agendas, the White House has continued to commit itself to fighting against one form of institutionalized injustice. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled Additional Measures To Combat Anti-Semitism in an effort to quell the increasing organization of protests across the country against the State Of Israel. Following the execution of that directive, the Trump administration has amplified its initiative by tasking the Department Of Justice with organizing a task force specifically designed to combat antisemitism it sees as a dire threat sweeping over the nation.

Like Trump's Executive Order, the impetus behind and immediate focus of the DOJ antisemitism task force is the wave of protests and organization of causes against Israel that have galvanized across college campuses nationwide since last spring. Leo Terrell, the head of the newly formed task force put forward its cause in plain terms, stating “The Department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found. The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending anti-Semitism in our schools." In order to achieve that goal, Trump administration officials have laid a path forward in which they will seek to void the visas of students who have been deemed to be engaged in antisemitic acts in order to deport them. That strategy has been met with criticism of how it presents a constitutional issue on the infringements of free speech and assembly guaranteed under the First Amendment which the United States Supreme Court has recognized as being extended to non-resident aliens under the Fourteenth Amendment for nearly 150 years.

The Trump administration's focus on confronting antisemitism comes at a time where programs aimed at addressing the systemic oppression of other minority groups have been stripped away. In light of that development, the newly created DOJ task force and underlying Executive Order that enabled it begs the question about why allocating resources specifically to combat antisemitism is the exception to the rule the Trump administration has made when it's come to disempowering widespread systems indoctrinating students with victim mentalities and a false dichotomy rooted in far left ideologies on racism that have been categorized as anti-white and divisive as a whole. Replacing those vestiges of the Biden administration with a different ideology that gives exclusive protection to one marginalized group instead of a potpourri of them is just a different expression of a problematic dynamic that the Trump administration has admitted has frayed the cultural unity of the country with its criticisms of DEI, etc.

Opponents of CRT, DEI, and the like have argued that the biases behind those initiatives put systems in place that exacerbate the very issues they are purportedly aimed against. Instead, they argue that colorblind initiatives to address issues should be implemented instead of advancing the individual causes of select minority groups as the exclusivity of resources being dedicated to them creates an unfair singular advancement against others. Thus, the decision to fund a program exclusively dedicated to combating amtisemitism flies in the face of the fundamental philosophy that the movement to abolish DEI is rooted in. As seen with DEI efforts to advance the cause of racial groups like African Americans or other marginalized groups like the LGBT, the political and cultural climate those efforts foster nurtures extremism on behalf of members of those groups who feel emboldened by policies that seemingly make them untouchable. Evident examples of this outcome have been shown from the rise of groups like Black Lives Matter to the increase in violence committed by transgender individuals such as the 2023 mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

That same dynamic has begun to ensue as the turning of the tide of tensions across college campuses has only seemed to embolden pro-Israel groups in the same radical manner. Betar US, a Zionist activist movement illustrates how that changing cultural landscape has put pro-Israel groups on the offensive. Last week, members of Betar US took to the campus of the New School, a university in New York City founded in 1919 to advance activism that has been very supportive of anti-Israel demonstrations, to hand out beepers to students as a symbolic threat against their efforts critical of Zionism. The decision by Betar US to hand out those beepers hearkens back to a Mossad-led campaign in Lebanon last year in which it implanted explosive devices in the devices in an effort to covertly attack Hezbollah. The attack led to the deaths and injuries of numerous innocent civilians.

The Betar Movement was founded in as a Zionist paramilitary group in 1923 in Riga, Latvia by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revionist Zionism. In addition to Betar, Jabotinsky would also be instrumental in creating Irgun, another Zionist paramilitary group which flourished alongside others in Mandatory Palestine. Irgun would carry out the King David Hotel Bombing as well as the murder of over 100 Palestinian civilians in the Deir Yassin Massacre which it perpetrated alongside fellow Zionist paramilitary Lehi. Following the death of Theodor Herzl in 1904, Jabotinsky ascended to the forefront of the Zionist movement only to leave its mainstream to advance his own form of Revisionist Zionism in 1923, which led to the creation of the paramilitary group Betar.

Betar US' origins as a paramilitary organization are rather ironic considering the accusations groups of its ilk it have made that demonstrators who joined the anti-Israel protests across the country last year weren't protected by free speech because of concerns over connections to Jihadist paramilitary groups. While widespread college protests last spring were not immune from being infiltrated by actors who expressed threats against Jewish students and the diaspora at large, the demonstrations were organized in an overarching effort to galvanize support for the Palestinian cause in the wake of the war in Gaza. That endeavor was embarked upon in a genuinely inclusive manner, conveyed by the fact those protests were joined by students of Jewish heritage themselves.

Demonstrations at Columbia University, which became the epicenter of the protests, maintained a milieu so accommodating to Jewish students at the college that they even held Seder during Passover in the encampments set up by the protesters. The observance of Seder was led by Jewish students that participated in the protests against Israel who were joined by non-Jewish students in a display of solidarity that defied the vapid conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism made by their critics. Poignant examples of unity such as that highlighted the complexity of the nuanced issues that served as the impetus behind the organization of the protests and how critics often relied on an oversimplification of what was occurring to push their own narratives aimed against them. While incidents that occurred the mass protests participated in by naive college students certainly crossed the threshold of what is and is not protected speech and assembly but characterizing the organization behind them as antisemitic as a whole would be a reductive distortion of history.

In contrast, the campaign organized by Betar US embodies everything critics of those protests and advocates of the DOJ task force on antisemitism in response to them have campaigned against. The irony of that outcome is the expected byproduct of paradoxical policy making that defies the very foundation of abolishing DEI-driven initiatives that have continued to stoke incendiary racial tensions that have proven to be stoke the fires of America's culture wars time and time again. The chaos that has been ushered in by the absence of logical and even moral consistency highlights the need for any attempts to disavow DEI to be full-fledged and unconditional if the stain it has left on American cultural is ever to be erased.