Trump's HHS investigating medical schools for antisemitism because students wore keffiyehs: report
Trump's HHS investigating medical schools for antisemitism because students wore keffiyehs: report
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Health agency noted medical schools receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. The Independent has contacted the medical schools of Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins for comment. “Columbia strongly condemns antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we are resolute that calls for violence or harm have no place at our University,” the university told the Post in the January article.
The investigations are the latest signal of the Trump administration’s priority of cracking down on alleged antisemitism on college campuses. In doing so, the new administration is wading into the complicated legal and philosophical debate about what constitutes antisemitism. Like the White House, the study relies in part on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which considers many forms of criticism of Israel to be antisemitic.
In the U.S. at least, many of those leading anti-Israel protests on campus are Jewish themselves. U.S. free speech law grants considerable protection to protest, including through views and symbols deemed offensive. Those speech protections are more ambiguous on a private college campus receiving government funds, though. The Trump administration’s focus on campus antisemitism and anti-Israel protest comes as the Republican said this week he wants to take control of the Gaza Strip and oversee its rebuilding, displacing millions of Gazans in a proposal criticized as a form of ethnic cleansing.
