I think at this point you have to be using some kind of motivated reasoning to pretend a Trump regime full of literal nazis who're kidnapping anti-genocide student protestors legally living and studying in the United States, is doing so to fight "antisemitism." This regime doesn't care about antisemitism, it cares about its genocidal settler colonial client state in the Middle East, Israel, but the administration, which frequently dabbles in open antisemitism, is happy to use the fight against really existing hatemongering against Jewish people as a cudgel to accomplish its fascist goals; namely allowing Israel to complete its genocide in Gaza, purging student dissidents with experience fighting the regime, and seizing control of higher education as part of a Yarvinite scheme to create a fascist dictatorship under Trump. As many, including some of the students quoted in the article I'm about to share have noted, weaponizing antisemitism to do fascism is in and of itself a form of antisemitism, and it's certainly not doing anything to help keep Jewish American students safe.

If any of that seemed controversial to you, I'd ask that you please consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student organizer who was lured in for seizure by the promise of a citizenship interview after being marked out by fascist, pro-genocide doxing groups Canary Mission, and Betar for having the nerve to go on 60 Minutes to talk about the occupation of Gaza and why the fight for Palestinian liberation and the fight against antisemitism "go hand-in-hand."

https://zeteo.com/p/jewish-students-slam-trump-arrest-moshen-mahdawi

'New Kind of Antisemitism': Jewish Students Slam Trump's Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi

"Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.

The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.

“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them."

I think one of the students quoted in this article summed up the situation best when he pointed out that Palestinians shouldn't have to be model minorities in American society for folks to treat them like human beings and care about their rights, but by all accounts, including those from school faculty and Jewish students who knew him, Mohsen Mahdawi was in fact that person. Indeed at the time of his kidnapping Mahdawi was actively working to bridge whatever rift exists between Palestinian and Jewish students at Columbia and in the surrounding community; so to claim you're fighting antisemitism by confining and attempting to deport such a person is a particularly crass and odious weaponization of one vulnerable minority to persecute another; which is probably why it appeals so much to a fascist regime full of imperialist Islamophobes and antisemites.

Look, as much as the regime (and society at large) wants to divide us all and put us into little boxes, the reality on the ground is that none of this serves the interests of everyday people in our society, be they Palestinian, Jewish, or neither. Weaponizing Jewish students and the safety of American Jews to install fascism *is* as one student put it, "the new kind of antisemitism." Targeting foreign students legally studying in the United States for opposing a genocide the regime wants to profit from, *is* fascism in action. Using foreign policy as an excuse to expel non-white people *is* part of a fascist project to establish a white ethno-state in America. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we all have a vested interest in stopping the persecution of folks like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil; not just because we could be next, but because a failure to do so will be a terrible stain on our common humanity, and diminish all that is worth saving about our shared society.

#Fascism #Columbia #Genocide #CanaryMission #MohsenMahdawi #Betar #Trump #StudentProtests #PoliceState #ICE #DHS #Israel #Gaza #antisemitism #Imperialism #Islamophobia #SettlerColonialism #RumeysaOzturk #MahmoudKhalil

https://www.commondreams.org/news/donald-trump-university

#educationworkers #labormovement #organize #solidarity #studentprotests

Because a significant portion of the regime's fascist efforts to crush dissent revolves around their fact-free declaration that opposing a US-backed genocide in Gaza, being conducted by Israel, is actually antisemitism (and also a foreign policy matter that is beyond regulation due to presidential powers over foreign affairs), the ruling class establishment that supported that genocide even when it belonged to Biden, has a vested interest in presenting Jewish Americans as a unified bloc standing in opposition to anti-genocide protestors in support of Israel and the Zionist agenda. After all, the narrative that all of this monstrous bullshit is being done to protect Jewish people falls apart very quickly once you realize that vast numbers of American Jews are actively against all this fascist, genocidal bullshit; so that latter fact has to be kept from the American public, lest they become wise to the reality that this is all just a propaganda op to justify arms sales, genocide, and fascist repression of folks ideological opposed to the regime.

The reality however, is quite different from the picture you're allowed to see on television; Jewish Americans are actually massively overrepresented in the anti-genocide protest movement, and a vibrant, growing collage of Jewish left organizations are risking the personal safety of their members to vigorously oppose a fascist regime and say, quite directly, that not only are the regime's actions putting Jewish people in danger, they will not allow genocide, deportations, and fascist repression to be conducted "in their name."

For more about this hidden, but not secret story, let's turn to this deep dive by Shane Burley into the rise of Jewish left resistance in America to settler colonial occupation, genocide, and the fascist Trump regime's attempts to deport student protestors under the guise of combatting antisemitism:

https://truthout.org/articles/jewish-organizations-are-fighting-back-against-khalil-deportation/

Jewish Organizations Are Fighting Back Against Khalil Deportation

“This year, all over the U.S., Jews are holding emergency Passover Seders calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil and an end to the criminalization of all those calling for an end to the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinian people,” JVP said as it announced the action. This seder is part of a long tradition of using Jewish rituals as a protest tactic, uniting the prophetic spiritual tradition of Judaism with the practical strategies of physical resistance and blockade. This action, offered with relatively short notice and promising to mobilize huge numbers of Jews and allies, is the result of the relationships that have been built across Jewish organizations as they try to confront the repression coming in Trump’s second term.

“We’re building a new coalition right now. Because not all of us have been in the same space together,” Lily Greenberg Call, a member of the New York City chapter of the Jewish anti-Occupation group IfNotNow, called into a megaphone on March 20. “But it is more important than ever now to reach for each other and unite for our communities and our neighbors who are under attack,” she told the thousand people who had flooded the streets of lower Manhattan, the historic home of the U.S. Jewish left. “People in this city have been abducted, separated from their families, thrown in detention camps, and threatened with deportation.”

Frankly, I don't really have a lot to add here because speaking for Jewish Americans who oppose fascism being conducted in their name really isn't my lane. Burley's extensive documentation of how Jewish resistance groups are banding together all across the country is however informative, and enlightening given a media environment where even critics of the Trump regime who still support genocidal Zionist objectives in Gaza are unprepared to report on that resistance. The obvious reality here is that no matter what the ADL says, a fascist regime stacked to the brim with antisemite nazis, doesn't give a flying fuck about combatting antisemitism, and fully intends to use the mere existence of Jewish people and antisemitism in our society, as the spear point for their transformation of America into an over fascist dictatorship - and that's a story, you just won't hear on the Six O'clock News.

#Fascism #Trump #Antisemitism #JewishLeft #MahmoudKhalil #ICE #Deportations #StudentProtests #Genocide #Gaza #Palestine #JVP #IfNotNow #Antifascism #ADL #Zionism