US Justice Department should enforce laws to protect Jewish students - opinion

• Published date: 09 April 2024
• Author: MARC GREENDORFER
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The stories are legion at this point, from masked and armed Hamas supporters stalking the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, to mobs of Jew-haters chasing Jewish students off other campuses or into hiding on campuses to university faculty facilitating and advising the campus groups that torment Jews with the goal of driving them off campus and into silence

These are not isolated incidents. They are national campaigns to effectively make university campuses Judenrein.

What is happening on campuses also hearkens back to this country's ugly history in the post-Reconstruction era, where groups of civilian vigilantes teamed up with government actors to deprive emancipated African Americans of their newly obtained constitutional and federal rights.

Long after slavery was abolished in the United States, it was not uncommon in parts of the country to see mobs, often affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, work with local officials to deprive Blacks of the right to speak, assemble and participate in government programs like public education. They carried out this campaign in a familiar fashion: hiding behind masks and employing weapons, the groups, with the backing of local law enforcement, school officials or even political office holders, showed up in large numbers to intimidate Blacks from going to schools or even voting.

It was a horrifically effective campaign.

Thankfully, laws were enacted to confront this menace and those laws still exist. Today, the laws, often known as the "KKK Laws," are used to combat everything from police brutality and election interference to, just this year, infringing on access to abortion facilities.

Department of Justice refuses to enforce laws to protect Jewish students

The problem is that while the United States Department of Justice has had no problem enforcing these laws against individuals and groups that they oppose, such as pro-life protesters, they have steadfastly refused to enforce the laws to protect Jewish students who are under the most formidable and widespread antisemitic assaults this country has ever seen.

Hopefully, that will soon change.

On behalf of 28 other organizations, Zachor Legal Institute (zachor means "remember") recently sent an enforcement request to Attorney-General Merrick Garland in late March. The request consisted of a history of the KKK Laws, documentation on how groups like Students for Justice in Palestine have coordinated and executed mass deprivations of rights of Jewish...