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‘Little Gaza’: US Sen. Tom Cotton Introduces Legislation to Combat Campus Radicalism
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of seditious, pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them, advancing the Republican Party’s offensive against the pro-Hamas student movement.
Shared first with Breitbart News, a news outlet that was instrumental in launching US President Donald Trump’s populist movement, the “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” and “Woke Endowment Security Tax (WEST)” come amid a series of riotous demonstrations promoting antisemitic ideas, as well as the goals of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and a widespread perception that elite universities have not done enough to combat them.
“First, any pro-Hamas protester convicted of a crime should be ineligible for federal student loans, and federal student loan relief. The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton said in a social media post on Tuesday announcing his introduction of the bills. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”
He continued, “The WEST Act would tax the largest university endowments to help pay down national debt and secure our southern border.”
As Cotton mentioned in his social media posts, the No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief. Meanwhile, the WEST Act would institute a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.
Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.
In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report, which said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future. Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers. It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.
The new Trump administration has taken steps to convert this vision into policy since assuming power in January.
On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions. Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
On Monday, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that dozens of colleges and universities will be investigated for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism. McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Little Gaza’: US Sen. Tom Cotton Introduces Legislation to Combat Campus Radicalism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Detroit Event with Keynote Address from Tlaib Draws Condemnation for Extremist Rhetoric
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
i24 News – A pro-Palestinian conference held in Detroit this week featuring popular influencers and Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib was condemned for the extremist, antisemitic and anti-American rhetoric of its participants.
“We all know who they are, whether they are in Israel, Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Germany, in Europe. They need to be locked up. They need to be taken out. They need to be neutralized to save children, to save humanity,” said Nidal Jboor, an MD.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) hit out at “genocide enablers,” launching broadsides in all directions, including against the United States, which she said was built on on “slavery, genocide, rape and oppression,” and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Lawyer Huwaida Arraf said “we will continue to globalize the intifada.”
Of the Congress, where she is serving, Tlaib said that “Outside of the decaying halls of the empire in Washington, D.C., we are winning. They are scared.”
Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. subsequently accused Tlaib of “vilifying her colleagues, endangering the lives of Jewish people, and celebrating terrorism.”
Yet another speaker declared that the word “peace” should not be part of the pro-Palestinian movement’s lexicon as “it is a white word,” in contrast to the “liberation.”
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Israeli Military Warns Gaza City Residents to Leave, Bombs High-Rise Tower
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike from earlier today that destroyed a residential building, in Gaza City, September 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Israeli military warned Palestinians in Gaza City to leave for the south on Saturday before bombing a high-rise tower as its forces advance deeper into the enclave’s largest urban area.
Israeli forces have been carrying out an offensive on the suburbs of the northern city for weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to capture it.
Netanyahu says Gaza City is a Hamas stronghold and capturing it is necessary to defeat the Palestinian Islamist militants, whose October 2023 attack on Israel sparked the war.
The assault threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering there from nearly two years of fighting. Before the war, around a million people, nearly half of Gaza’s population, lived in the city.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on X that residents should leave the city for a designated coastal area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, assuring those fleeing that they would be able to receive food, medical care and shelter there.
The designated area was a “humanitarian zone,” Adraee said.
The military also issued so-called “evacuation warnings” to civilians in certain areas of the city, warning it was about to carry out attacks.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz shared a video on X of what appeared to be the multi-story building collapsing after the strike, sending a cloud of dust and debris into the air.
It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.
The Israeli military said Hamas used the building to gather intelligence and that explosive devices had been planted nearby. Hamas denied using the building for military purposes, and Palestinians said it had been used to shelter the displaced.
“These towers are strictly monitored, entry is permitted exclusively for civilians,” Hamas said in a statement, adding the Israeli allegations constitute “a systematic forced displacement” plan.
HEAVY STRIKES
The Israeli military bombed another high-rise tower on Friday that it had also said was being used by Hamas.
On Thursday, the military said it had control over almost half of Gaza City. It says it controls about 75% of all of Gaza.
Many of those in Gaza City were displaced earlier in the war only to later return. Some residents have said that they refuse to be displaced again.
The military has been carrying out heavy strikes on the city for weeks, advancing through outer suburbs, and this week forces were within a few kilometers of the city center.
ALL-OR-NOTHING DEAL
Palestinian terrorists took 251 hostages into the enclave after a Hamas-led cross-border attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023 that killed about 1,200 people.
There are also growing calls within Israel, led by families of hostages and their supporters, to end the war in a diplomatic deal that would secure the release of the remaining 48 captives.
Israeli officials believe 20 of the hostages are alive.
Netanyahu is pushing for an all-or-nothing deal that would see all of the hostages released at once and Hamas surrendering.
A video released by Hamas on Friday showed two captives, one of whom said they were being held in Gaza City and that they feared being killed in Israel’s assault on the urban center.
Israeli military officials say they have killed many of Hamas’ key leaders and thousands of its fighters.
Hamas has offered to release some hostages for a temporary ceasefire, similar to terms that were discussed in July before negotiations mediated by the US and Arab states collapsed.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington was in “very deep” negotiations with the Palestinian militants.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades but today controls only parts of the enclave, has long said it would release all hostages if Israel agreed to end the war and to withdraw all its forces from Gaza.
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Antisemites Target Synagogues in Spain, France Amid Surge in Jew Hatred Across Europe
The exterior wall of a synagogue in Girona, Spain, vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Photo: Screenshot
Pro-Palestinian activists have vandalized synagogues in Spain and France in recent days, sparking public outrage and calls for authorities to step up protections.
These are only the latest incidents in a troubling wave of anti-Jewish hate crimes targeting Jewish communities across Europe which continues unabated.
On Thursday, the Jewish community of Girona, a city in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, filed a police complaint and urged authorities to take action after the outer wall of the city’s synagogue was defaced with an antisemitic slogan.
Unknown perpetrators defaced the synagogue’s walls with antisemitic graffiti, scrawling messages such as “Israel is a genocidal state, silence = complicity.”
The city’s Jewish community strongly condemned the incident, urging authorities to conduct a swift investigation, impose exemplary sanctions, and ensure robust security measures.
“Disguised as political activism, [this attack] seeks to stigmatize citizens for their faith — something intolerable in a democratic society,” the statement reads. “Tolerance and respect are values we must defend together.”
The European Jewish Association (EJA) also condemned the incident as a hate crime, urging the Spanish government to ensure the safety and protection of its Jewish citizens.
“This is yet another antisemitic attack, part of a wave we’ve seen daily for nearly two years,” the EJA wrote in a post on X.
This is what members of the Jewish community in Girona found this morning when they arrived at their synagogue to pray.
Antisemitic vandals had defaced the synagogue’s outer wall with the words:
“ISRAEL ESTAT GENOCIDA, SILENCI = CÒMPLICE”
Translation: “Israel is a genocidal… pic.twitter.com/ERj4z1hKOP— EJA – EIPA (@EJAssociation) September 4, 2025
In a separate incident, three pro-Palestinian activists were arrested on Thursday after trying to force their way into a synagogue in Nice, southeastern France, during an informational meeting on aliyah, the process of Jews immigrating to Israel.
According to local reports, several individuals attempted to forcibly enter the place of worship, sparking violent clashes and insults that left a pregnant woman injured.
Shortly after the incident, law enforcement arrested two women in their forties and a man in his sixties, taking them into custody as part of an investigation into aggravated violence.
The charges involve attacks on a vulnerable person, actions carried out by a group, religious motivation, and public religious insults.
Local authorities strongly condemned the act and announced that police officers would remain stationed outside the synagogue for as long as necessary.
Since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have surged to alarming levels across Europe.
Jewish individuals have been facing a surge in hostility and targeted attacks, including vandalism of murals and businesses, as well as physical assaults.