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As Trump Takes Office, Will the New Administration Help Stop Radicalism on College Campuses?
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
The new Trump administration promises to shift the landscape for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and anti-Israel politics.
A new Executive Order orders action to combat antisemitism, including deporting violent and terror-supporting non-citizens, and the administration’s efforts to remove the Federal DEI enterprise removes a key support for anti-Israel and antisemitic policies at universities receiving government funds.
The effectiveness of these and other measures remains unclear — but the new and supportive rhetoric must be contrasted with the new administration’s established pattern of pressuring Israel to make concessions.
Responding to increasing scrutiny, higher education professionals have rebranded DEI courses and offices, and more evidence has accumulated that university administrations are working to dilute or replace the focus on campus antisemitism. At Northwestern University, critics have noted that a required training program on discrimination and harassment omitted Israel and Zionism as targeted categories, but included “anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases.” The University of Toronto also launched a working group on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian discrimination.
Universities and localities continue, however, to act against students who have violated regulations and laws:
- The University of Rochester expelled four students for putting up “wanted posters” targeting Jewish faculty and staff. The students also face criminal mischief charges;
- A University of Chicago student was arrested and charged with aggravated battery in connection with an October 2024 anti-Israel protest. Students later protested outside the president’s residence in support of the arrested individuals;
- Another four Case Western students were arrested and charged with felonious vandalism in connection with a November building takeover;
- Two Dartmouth College students were found guilty of misdemeanor trespass after refusing to leave an encampment in October 2023;
- A Northwestern University Ph.D. graduate pled guilty to a firebomb attack and lighting fires “in solidarity with Palestinians” at the University of California at Berkeley;
- At Princeton University, 14 students and others will stand trial in April on charges of defiant criminal trespassing in connection with an April 2024 takeover of a university building;
- New York University suspended 13 students who held a sit-in that disrupted the university library in December. One of the students accused the school of “targeting brown and Arab students;”
- Three University of Michigan students were charged with misdemeanors in connection with a fall 2024 “die-in.”
Divestment now appears nearly dead on American campuses. In January Johns Hopkins University rejected divesting from Israel as inappropriately political and impractical, as did the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Maine system. At the University of Georgia, however, students disrupted a board of regents meeting to demand divestment.
This follows a spate of protests by medical professionals, including a letter of support from the American Academy of Pediatrics to then Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in support of Hamas doctor Hussam Abu Safiya who was arrested in Gaza. “Call out sick for Gaza” protests occurred at Boston area hospitals including Harvard Medical School.
Physicians associated with Columbia University also complained administrators had engaged in “the erasure of Palestinian morbidity and mortality and “systematic repression and censorship of health-oriented discussions of the genocide.” The support for Hamas demonstrated by physicians at their medical school graduations is an ominous foreshadowing of future mistreatment of patients on the basis of religion or national identity that has already been documented in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Faculty
In the faculty sphere, one of the most notable developments in January was a resolution approved by the American Historical Association (AHA) members at its annual meeting to condemn “scholasticide” in Gaza. The resolution alleged that Israel had intentionally and systematically destroyed Gaza’s educational infrastructure using US weapons. Once approved the resolution moved to the executive committee before being sent to the full membership. The executive committee, however, vetoed the resolution, stating that “it lies outside the scope of the association’s mission and purpose.”
The AHA’s executive committee’s decision follows a similar one by the Modern Language Association to prevent a BDS resolution from being put to the full membership. The moves suggest that academic leaders — with the notable exception of the umbrella American Association of University Professors, which has endorsed “individual” Israel boycotts and whose leadership is strongly hostile to Israel — are perceiving BDS as a losing issue from the perspective of disciplinary reputation and perhaps legal and public relations liability. There is a schism between younger academics inculcated with the ideology of “scholar-activism” and an older generation.
Despite or perhaps as a result of small signs of resistance to BDS by leaders of academic organizations, faculty unions have emerged as centers of Israel hatred.
Resolutions demanding divestment area are also means to split the faculty and more importantly, leverage affiliated union support. In one example the City University of New York Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) union voted to divest from Israel. A Jewish faculty group then filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights.
The union vote was condemned by the university and New York State governor Kathy Hochul (D). The refusal of the Supreme Court to hear an earlier case regarding the union leaves in limbo the question of whether Jewish and other faculty can be fairly represented by a politicized union.
In an example of the mendacity and mediocrity that characterizes so many anti-Israel faculty members, Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke claimed that she had been forced to retire as a result of her “pro-Palestinian” activities. Her claim that the move was “termination dressed up in more palatable terms” was belied by report from an outside law firm which documented her persistent harassment and defamation of Israeli and Jewish students and “prohibited racial stereotyping.”
Franke has now filed a grievance against the school’s Office of Institutional Equity accusing it of “a pattern and anti-Palestinian racism.”
In a related development, the Islamist group CAIR declared that Columbia was a hostile campus for pro-Palestinian students.
Reports continue to accumulate regarding the routine incorporation of anti-Israel materials into coursework in disciplines as varied as English and music. At the University of Pittsburgh, faculty also offered extra credit for attending anti-Israel protests and berated students for their support of Israel and “Jewish privilege.” A video taken at the Barnard College English department shows that every faculty member’s door is decorated with anti-Israel flyers.
Other examples of campus propagandizing include a panel entitled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine” to be held at the University of California Berkeley in February. A description of the panel promises to “look at how Zionism has weaponized feminism, so as to serve Israel’s genocidal intent, by upholding debunked accusations of systematic Hamas mass assault.” After the event was publicized, the university removed the description from its website.
Students
With the semester underway campus protests against Israel have resumed but at lower level:
- At Cornell University protestors vandalized a statue in the center of campus with “Divest from death” and “occupation=death” and red paint. When interviewed, the anonymous protestors stated their goal was the elimination of Israel;
- At Columbia University “New York City Resists with Gaza” and “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” destroyed the sewage system at the International Affairs Building with cement and spray painted graffiti there and on the business school. In a social media posting the groups stated they had “attacked two targets” to note the death of Hind Rajab and to resist “One of Columbia’s most recent violent gentrification projects into Harlem, the construction of which was conditioned on the creation of Columbia’s Apartheid Global Center in ‘Tel Aviv’”;
- Columbia University protestors vandalized the campus with “Land back, nothing less than liberation.” Demonstrators also held several protests off campus;
- Also at Columbia masked protestors entered a modern Israel history class, reading manifestos and handing out leaflets saying “Curse Zionism.” The university president condemned the incident, warned that police presence on campus might be expanded, and later suspended one ‘”affiliate” for participating in the incident and barred two others from campus. A faculty group also condemned the incident;
- At Yale University, a speaking appearance by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the Hillel was protested by students and others who attempted to block entrance to the building and who then occupied the building’s lobby;
- Protestors at Oxford University occupied a campus library. They stated the building had been renamed the “Khalida Jarrar Library” after the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine;
- At Ohio State University, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter held a protest outside of the Chabad house during a Holocaust remembrance event, which included several former Israeli soldiers.
Pushback to university disciplinary efforts is also continuing. At the University of Chicago, a lawsuit has been filed by Palestine Legal, the lawfare arm of the BDS movement, on behalf of a student who had been disciplined and removed from student housing.
But in a sign that the anti-Israel movement and “Palestine” as an organizing principle continue to alienate fellow students, the black feminist group at George Washington University “Black Defiance” announced it had left the Student Coalition for Palestine “after repeatedly experiencing anti-Blackness and racism.”
Finally, in the new semester student governments quickly regained their place as centers for anti-Israel activity:
- Several student governments at the University of California at San Diego have divested their holdings from Israeli companies;
- The Concordia University Student Union passed a BDS resolution. Only 858 students out of 49,898 enrolled voted;
- The Rutgers University student government rejected use of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
- The student government at the University of Toronto held a fundraiser for Gaza during a meeting.
K-12
Evidence continues to accumulate regarding deep and pervasive bias against Israel and Jews at all levels of K-12 education. Efforts to coverup and downplay incidents also continue locally.
In a settlement reached with the Howard County Public Schools (MD), the US Department of Education noted that authorities had failed to report incidents where Jewish students were abused, including “posting of swastikas; mimicking Nazi salutes; threats to kill and stating preference for death of Jewish people; using the term “Jew” as a slur; calling a Jewish middle school student a “dirty Jew,” telling her to “go back to the gas chamber.”
Teachers and their unions continue to push “liberated ethnic studies” and “anti-Palestinian racism” in curriculums.
Arts/Culture
Social media and web platforms continue to be key battlegrounds regarding Israel and antisemitism. Wikipedia’s highest adjudicating body, the Arbitration Committee, has barred a number of editors who had systematically distorted the platform’s coverage of Israel, Palestine, and related topics.
The move came after months of revelations regarding the manner in which the group had conspired via back channel communications to edit pieces in order to blame Israel for the current conflict and accuse it among others things of “settler-colonialism” and “genocide.” Six pro-Hamas editors were barred in addition to two pro-Israel editors. A recent report also uncovered a group of pro-Hamas editors conspiring to manipulate French Wikipedia.
The move against pro-Hamas editors came after the Heritage Foundation announced a project to identify anonymous Wikipedia editors responsible for anti-Israel bias.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a significantly different version of this article first appeared.
The post As Trump Takes Office, Will the New Administration Help Stop Radicalism on College Campuses? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Dutch Nurse Under Police Investigation for Alleged Threats Against Israeli Patients
Pro-Hamas demonstrators march in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. Photo: Reuters/Romy Arroyo Fernandez
A Muslim nurse in the Netherlands is under police investigation after allegedly threatening to administer lethal injections to Israeli patients — an incident that has sparked public outrage and intensified fears over rising antisemitism and patient safety in Europe’s health-care systems.
The comments were widely circulated by Israeli influencer Max Veifer, who also exposed a recent case in Australia where two nurses were suspended for two years over antisemitic threats and remarks.
In a video shared on social media, Veifer denounced Dutch-Muslim nurse Batisma Chayat Sa’id’s remarks as a serious violation of medical ethics.
“Someone like that should be prosecuted and barred from treating patients. Imagine your grandparents being cared for by someone so hateful,” the Israeli influencer said.
Zorgwekkende dreiging op Instagram: Nederlandse verpleegkundige is bereid om “zionisten een extra spuitje te geven” en bereid “zionisten te laten sterven binnen de gezondheidszorg.” pic.twitter.com/xTnXNi1wH5
— CIDI
(@CIDI_nieuws) July 29, 2025
The incident was sparked when an Israeli-Dutch woman living in the Netherlands commented on a social media post by far-right politician Geert Wilders, who cautioned about what he called the country’s looming radical Islamization by 2050.
A social media account belonging to the Muslim nurse also commented on the post, claiming it would happen by 2027, to which the Israeli woman responded, “Your dream is our nightmare. But people wake up from nightmares. Our Netherlands, our Israel.”
“Nothing belongs to you! My grandparents built the Netherlands. I was born and raised here, and I will do everything in my power to help this country get rid of the Zionist cancer,” the nurse further replied.
“You know what I’m doing with Zionists — giving an extra injection as a nurse specialist. Letting them go to heaven!” Sa’id continued.
When the Israeli woman threatened to report her, Sa’id replied: “Haha, try your best! I don’t have a boss — I’m the boss! All Zionists can die, inside healthcare and beyond, and I’m happy to help with that!”
Shortly after her posts gained widespread attention, Sa’id deleted all her social media accounts, insisting that her identity had been stolen and that she was not responsible for such comments.
On Wednesday, local police detained Sa’id for questioning, but she denied the allegations, asserting that someone had impersonated her online.
“It seems someone is pretending to be me, posting false and defamatory statements,” the nurse said. “I want to make it clear — I hold no hatred toward Jews or any people, race, religion, or identity.”
Even after announcing plans to file an identity theft complaint, she faces skepticism from authorities, who have assigned a digital forensics expert to scrutinize her online accounts.
Last year, an account under her name also posted threatening messages aimed at Jewish people, including “Your time will come — don’t spare anyone,” and another in which she described the burial of Israelis in Gaza as “a dream come true.”
Earlier this year, two Australian nurses — Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh — gained international attention after they were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night-shift conversation with Veifer.
The widely circulated footage, which sparked international outrage and condemnation, showed Abu Lebdeh declaring she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them, while Nadir made a throat-slitting gesture and claimed he had already killed many.
Following the incident, New South Wales authorities in Australia suspended their nursing registrations and banned them from working as nurses nationwide.
They were also charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass. If convicted, they face up to 22 years in prison.
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French Authorities Halt Gaza Evacuations After Palestinian Student Expelled Over Viral Antisemitic Posts
Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
French authorities have halted evacuations from Gaza after a Palestinian student was expelled from the prestigious Sciences Po Lille and placed under investigation, following the viral circulation of hundreds of antisemitic posts praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the murder of Jews.
The incident drew widespread condemnation and public outrage, prompting French ministers to demand answers and call for an investigation into how the Gazan student was allowed into the country in the first place.
On Friday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that all further evacuations from Gaza would be suspended pending the completion of the investigation into the student’s background.
After receiving a scholarship, 25-year-old Nour Atalla, a Palestinian from Gaza, arrived in the country in early July to begin her master’s degree in law and communications this fall at the Institute of Political Science in Lille, northern France.
Barrot confirmed that discussions are ongoing about the student’s possible return to Gaza, making clear that she must leave the country pending the investigation’s outcome.
“She has no place at Sciences Po, nor in France,” the top French diplomat said.
On Thursday, local authorities reported that a criminal investigation is underway into Atalla, with the public prosecutor in Lille confirming the case was opened for “apology of terrorism, apology of crimes against humanity using an online public communication service.”
Barrot admitted lapses in the screening process that allowed her entry and has mandated a comprehensive review of everyone evacuated from Gaza to France.
“The security checks, carried out by the French services and Israeli authorities, did not detect the antisemitic content,” the French diplomat said.
Atalla is one of 292 Gazans admitted to the country following a court ruling that opened the door for Gazans to seek refugee status based on their nationality.
She was offered a place at Sciences Po Lille University based on “academic excellence” and following a recommendation by the French consulate in Jerusalem.
On Wednesday, the university announced it had revoked Atalla’s enrollment after hundreds of her past antisemitic and violent social media posts went viral, sparking widespread condemnation from political leaders and members of the local Jewish community.
In several of these posts, she glorified Hitler, praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, called for the execution of Israeli hostages and the killing of Jews, and expressed support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
In one post, Atalla shared a video of Hitler giving a speech about Jews, writing, “Kill their young and their old. Show them no mercy … And kill them everywhere.”
In another post shared on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, she wrote, “We must do everything we can to match the bloodshed — as much as possible.”
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Florida State University Student Suspended for Allegedly Assaulting Jewish Classmate at Gym
Female student at Florida State University, believed to be graduate student Eden Deckerhoff, who allegedly assaulted male Jewish classmate at gym on campus. Photo: Screenshot/StopAntisemitism
Florida State University has suspended a female student who allegedly assaulted a Jewish male classmate at the Leach Student Recreation Center on Thursday after noticing his wearing apparel issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“F—k Israel, Free Palestine. Put it [the video] on Barstool FSU. I really don’t give a f—k,” the woman said before shoving the man, according to video taken by the victim, who filmed the encounter. “You’re an ignorant son of a b—h.”
According to StopAntisemitism, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group, the assailant is graduate student Eden Deckerhoff. Florida State University (FSU) reportedly employs her mother, Rosalyn Deckerhoff, as a teaching professor in its College of Social Work.
“The matter is being reviewed for potential criminal charges and for charges under the FSU Student Code of Conduct,” the university said in a statement on Tuesday. “While this process is underway, the student shown prominently in the video has been prohibited from returning to campus. Our commitment to swiftly and effectively responding to incidents of hate is unwavering. We appreciate the prompt report of this incident, which allowed us to address this instance of antisemitism without delay.”
It continued, “Florida State University strongly condemns antisemitism in all forms and follows Florida law, which protects Jewish students and employees from discrimination motivated by antisemitism, harassment, intimidation, and violence.”
The incident is a surprise occurrence at FSU, which has not come under the same scrutiny as many other US universities for allegedly allowing antisemitism to fester on campus.
In 2024, as a tide of antisemitic discrimination swept across the US, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) directed the state university system to streamline the transfer process for Jewish students seeking to leave a school where they have a “well-founded fear of antisemitic persecution.”
Under the new policy, the State University System of Florida and the Florida College System may waive certain transfer application requirements that would “unnecessarily” delay transferring from one school to the next. The policy also affords Jewish students more time to submit their applications and relieves them of minimum credit requirements that would also prevent or delay their matriculating at a new campus.
“With leaders of so-called elite universities enabling antisemitic activities rather than protecting their students from threats and harassment, it is understandable that many Jewish students are looking for alternatives and looking to Florida,” DeSantis, who was seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for president of the United States at the time, said in a press release. “Throughout my tenure as governor, we have implemented measures to safeguard our Jewish communities from hatred in the K-20 school system, and with this announcement, we want to again make it clear that Jewish students are welcome to live and learn in Florida, where they will be respected and not persecuted due to their faith.”
DeSantis had previously enacted policies to curb extreme anti-Zionist activity on higher education campuses in Florida.
Following the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the state’s university system, working in consultation with the governor, directed public universities to “deactivate” chapters of the national group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for defending Hamas following the Palestinian terrorist group’s invasion of the Jewish state earlier that month. In a memo, State University System of Florida chancellor Ray Rodrigues referenced how, following Hamas’s onslaught, the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization called for a “Day of Resistance” on college campuses across the US, distributing propaganda aimed at demonizing Israel and seemingly defending Hamas.
In December 2021, DeSantis’ office issued a statement advising Florida State University not to allow the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), with which it was an institutional partner, from operating a boycott of Israel on its campus. The association had just moved towards — and ultimately arrived at — an endorsement of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.