{"id":1634,"date":"2026-08-23T07:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T07:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1634"},"modified":"2026-08-23T07:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T07:06:12","slug":"jamie-raskins-trump-obsession-trumps-antisemitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1634","title":{"rendered":"Jamie Raskin\u2019s Trump Obsession Trumps Antisemitism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cBreaking News.\u201d That\u2019s how\u00a0The Washington Post begins the story whose headline read, \u201cThe Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more We\u2019re Teaching Kids Scarcity in an Age of Abundance<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLittle to no evidence of systemic abuse,\u201d you say? According to a \u201cwhistleblower,\u201d forsooth. More like a whistling-in-the-wind blower.\u201d You can read the 25-page complaint\u00a0. It posted on August 17. The next day, Johnny on the Spot \u201cI-Hate-Trump\u201d Rep. Jamie Raskin was on the case with aaddressed to Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.<\/p>\n

Is \u201cscreed\u201d too strong? You tell me. Here\u2019s a sample:<\/p>\n

[Y]our \u201cinvestigation\u201d into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature, Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications. This sham investigation is and will remain a shameful stain on the record of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Civil Rights Division and represents a clear and present danger to American academic preeminence in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cA shameful stain!\u201d \u201cA clear and present danger!\u201d Can anyone take this joker seriously?<\/p>\n

The intemperate rhetoric may be necessary, however. It\u2019s a tricky task Raskin has set himself. He has to pound antisemitism sufficiently while at the same time giving credence to that \u201clittle to no evidence of systemic abuse\u201d claimed by the whistleblower. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?\u00a0<\/i>Cicero might have been able to pull it off. Jamie Raskin, not so much.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, quoth Raskin, antisemitism at American university is \u201creal.\u201d (Thanks, pal.) But ooooo, that horrible man Trump has used antisemitism as a \u201cpretext\u201d for \u201cretaliating against, and punishing, universities, faculty, and students for engaging in protected speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cProtected speech,\u201d you say? Is occupying college buildings \u201cspeech,\u201d protected or otherwise? Is threatening Jewish students and faculty \u201cprotected speech\u201d? Is destroying college property or kidnapping janitors?<\/p>\n

Raskin and his whistleblowers have a logical problem. They want to acknowledge the sudden rise in antisemitism\u2014not to do so would lose them public support\u2014but they can\u2019t bear to acknowledge that Donald Trump was doing something about it. So they tie themselves into knots, claiming that the administration went after Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions not because of the flagrant (\u201csystemic\u201d?) antisemitism but because Trump doesn\u2019t like free speech\/education\/the ivy league\/whatever.<\/p>\n

The timing of the one-two whistleblower\/Raskin punch is worth noting, too. Just a few days earlier, on August 14, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the Trump administration\u2019s lawsuit against Harvard for failing to address antisemitism on its campus. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling and it might well win on appeal. But the dismissal now provides some much-needed cover for wheeling out the word \u201cpretext.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Green Movement\u2019s Selective Outrage Over ESA Reforms<\/a><\/p>\n

But what about the pretext for Raskin\u2019s broadside against the DOJ? What about that whistleblower complaint? That was the predicate for the media assault and Raskin\u2019s high horse. What should we think of it? We should think poorly of it. Some enterprising blogger asked Grok about whether its framing of the situation in places like Columbia, Harvard, and Penn was convincing. Here, in part, is what Grok said:<\/p>\n

After October 7, 2023, campuses\u2014especially elite ones\u2014saw a sharp, measurable spike in anti-Israel and antisemitic activity. ADL tracked thousands of incidents (assault, harassment, vandalism, disruptive protests, BDS pushes) in 2023\u201324, with Columbia frequently ranking at or near the top, followed by schools including Harvard. Encampments spread to over 100\u2013160 campuses; some involved building occupations (Hamilton Hall at Columbia), property damage, and explicit chants supporting Hamas or calling for the destruction of Israel\/Zionism. Jewish students reported exclusion from spaces, harassment, and fear of identifying as Jewish or Zionist at high rates\u2014surveys showed majorities experiencing or witnessing antisemitism, with particularly hostile environments documented at Columbia, Penn, and others.<\/p>\n

University leadership\u2019s response was widely seen as inadequate until external pressure mounted. The December 2023 House hearing featuring the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), Penn (Liz Magill), and MIT produced the viral exchange in which they refused clear answers on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules\u2014\u201cit depends on the context.\u201d Magill and Gay resigned amid the fallout. Columbia\u2019s Minouche Shafik faced her own hearing later. Faculty involvement was not marginal: departments issued one-sided statements, some professors celebrated or contextualized the October 7 attacks, and long-standing patterns in Middle East studies and related fields treated Israel as uniquely illegitimate while soft-pedaling or ignoring far larger conflicts and atrocities elsewhere. Tenure and institutional culture limited accountability.<\/p>\n

\u201cLittle to no evidence of systemic abuse?\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the single best analysis of the Whistleblower complaint was a\u00a0thread on X by Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Goldfeder\u2019s commentary is not only astute but also amusing. He identifies the \u201ccore complaint\u201d thus: \u201cCareer attorneys [at the DOJ] were reassigned to work they didn\u2019t choose, on timelines they didn\u2019t like, and leadership overruled their recommendations. In most workplaces this is called Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe disclosure,\u201d Goldfeder continues,<\/p>\n

measures everything against \u201clongstanding investigative practices.\u201d It never asks what those practices produced for Jewish students: complaints aging in queues while encampments grew and students were told to stay home for their own safety.<\/p>\n

The longstanding practice was non-enforcement with excellent paperwork. [Bingo!]<\/p>\n

Read the disclosure\u2019s own facts without its adjectives. She flagged First Amendment issues in the Columbia findings; the general counsel\u2019s office removed them. She objected to a witness list; it was negotiated down. That\u2019s not a predetermined outcome, that\u2019s a review process.<\/p>\n

Then Goldfeder moves in for the kill. \u201cRun the substitution test,\u201d he says. What if we substituted the adjective \u201cblack\u201d for \u201cJewish\u201d? What then? What if this were a case of black students complaining for years about harassment only to find, with Trump, that the law was suddenly being enforced? Would Jamie Raskin be doing his imitation of the thunder god? We would be hailing whistleblowers? On the contrary. We would, as Goldfeder observes, ask what took them so long. The bottom line:<\/p>\n

The real scandal preserved in this document is sixty years old, and it\u2019s not the one on the cover page. These members of Congress want to investigate whether the government moved too fast for Jewish students. Nobody ever convened a hearing on why it moved not at all. That asymmetry is the whole story, and no whistleblower has come forward about it yet.<\/p>\n

Read more MAGA and the DSA, Part Two: Differences Between These Populist Antagonists<\/a><\/p>\n

Nor will one. And for that, Goldfeder concludes, \u201cShame on them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBreaking News.\u201d That\u2019s how The Washington Post begins the story whose headline read, \u201cThe Trump administration task force charged with investigating\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump-derangement-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\nJamie Raskin\u2019s Trump Obsession Trumps Antisemitism - Urban Economy news<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1634\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jamie Raskin\u2019s Trump Obsession Trumps Antisemitism - 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