University leaders from Georgetown University, University of California, Berkeley, and the City University of New York were grilled for over three hours on Tuesday by a House panel investigating campus antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 Hamas massacre.
The session, chaired by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), followed hearings earlier this year on the anti-Israel encampments that convulsed college campuses. This time, the House Committee on Education and Workforce delved into why these antisemitic outbursts so readily took hold at the nation’s universities.
The simple answer is that these institutions are rotten to the core: The faculty — including groups like FSJP; faculty unions — and foreign influence peddling are the drivers of campus antisemitism.
While the faculty were the focus of the hearings, Walberg explained that DEI policies have also fueled campus antisemitism: The DEI ideology embraced by so many university bureaucrats categorizes Jews as white oppressors and therefore excuses or even justifies antisemitic harassment. The violence, fear, and alienation felt by Jewish students is at its core a result of administrators and their staff lacking the moral clarity to condemn and punish antisemitism that is creating a hostile environment for Jewish students on America’s campuses.”
Meanwhile, faculty unions “played a critical role fomenting antisemitism at universities under the guise of labor rights.”
Walberg called for greater transparency into foreign funding to universities from authoritarian countries like Qatar, especially for universities like Georgetown that have a separate campus there. An in-depth study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP) recently revealed Georgetown received over a billion dollars in donations from Qatar.
The lengthy session was briefly interrupted four times by pro-Palestine protesters.
Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor of The City University of New York, testified on behalf of CUNY. Once known for welcoming working-class Jewish students when other schools excluded them, CUNY is now a hotbed of Jew-hatred.
Rodriguez was doggedly questioned by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). (Readers may recall Stefanik was great at the campus antisemitism hearings we covered here.) Yesterday, she reminded Rodriguez that in 2021, he hired Saly Abd Alla, a former employee of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), as CUNY’s chief diversity officer.
While it holds itself out as a Muslim civil rights organization, CAIR has long been accused of sympathizing with Islamic terror, including Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Rep. Stefanik’s full questioning is captured in the @StopAntisemites post below.
So is it okay, from your perspective, obviously it is, to have a former employee of CAIR?
Later, when Rep. Messmer (R-IN) followed up on Stefanik’s questions, Rodriguez refused to call CAIR antisemitic: “The Director of CAIR said after the October 7th attacks that he was happy to see people breaking the siege. Is CAIR an antisemitic organization?” Messmer asked.
Rodriguez balked: “I mean, CAIR, I don’t know about their policy about being antisemitic or not.”
Dr. Robert M. Groves, Interim President of Georgetown University, was questioned by Chairwoman Emerita Virginia Foxx. She asked him about Jonathan A.C. Brown, one of the professors at the Georgetown Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. After the United States’ successful strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Brown tweeted, “I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on the base.”
Groves said Brown had been placed on disciplinary leave and removed as chair of his department over the tweet, which was later removed. He’s still reportedly listed as “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization” on Georgetown’s website, however:
Further on, Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) asked Groves whether Georgetown would allow members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to speak on campus. Dr. Groves replied with a mealymouthed “I don’t think we would.” Rep. Owens pressed him further: “If Georgetown would prevent white KKK bigots on campus, why would the university allow faculty and students to invite antisemitic bigots?”
Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) expressed disgust with the witnesses’ testimony which he found to be “dishonest” and “gaslighting.” He confronted Dr. Rich Lyons, Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, over why he hired and continues to employ professor Ussama Makdisi, who stated the unprovoked October 7th attack was justified.
Chancellor Lyons repeatedly defended Makdisi as “a fine scholar.”
Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) pressed for full transparency for foreign donations at Berkeley. When asked whether he would commit to fully reporting foreign payments, Chancellor Lyons stated he has several donors who request anonymity and could not commit to transparency.
“What do you think that says to the American people when you want to hide foreign influence on your college campus?” Rep. Baumgartner replied.
Throughout the hearings, Republican members took turns questioning the witnesses with Democrats, who invariably made it all about Trump. They accused his administration of “weaponizing” antisemitism to justify attacks on higher education. They also denounced Trump’s cuts to the Department of Education, whose dismantling was greenlighted by the Supreme Court earlier this week.
“While we are holding hearings to combat antisemitism on campuses, the very office in the Department of Education that works to protect Jewish students, the Office for Civil Rights, has been attacked, undermined, and cut by the Trump administration,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ).
But as Walberg pointed out, “some of the most egregious events — encampments, violence, destruction of property” took place during the Biden administration, while the OCR was “at full strength.”
Antisemitism is “basically a university problem,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) concluded. “We’re never going to have a committee hearing on antisemitism at the construction site. We’re never going to have one antisemitism working in retail or working in manufacturing or in the military or antisemitism in the retirement home.” And that’s because “we have such a slanted overall view of the world and the university compared to the country as a whole.”
“Universities are just overwhelmingly Democrat, which is a breeding ground for this antisemitism because right now the progressive wing of the Democrat party … this anti-Israel feeling has become … the norm.”
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