World Jewish News
Can Donald Trump “Fix” Higher Education in the United States?

By HENRY SREBRNIK When protests disrupted campuses nationwide in the United States last year celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, signs and chants demanded “Divest!” and “Cease-fire now!” This fall, much of the protest language has grown darker, echoing language used by Hamas, and declaring “Glory to the resistance!”
Some protesters now refer to them as the “al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas uses. “Oct. 7 IS FOREVER” has been spray-painted on walls at colleges. The shift is very apparent at Columbia University in New York, one of the main centres of the protests.
This new messaging has been noticed by Hillel chapters across the country, observed Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International. “The overall picture on campus,” he said, “has moved from a mass protest movement that embodied a diverse set of goals and rhetoric to this more concentrated and therefore more extreme and radical set of goals, tactics and rhetoric.”
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to crack down on these campus protests, and his allies expect the Department of Education to more aggressively investigate university responses to pro-Palestinian movements.
“If you get me re-elected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he told donors last May. Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”
In an Agenda47 policy video released last July, he asserted that “the time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.” Trump promised to axe federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “antisemitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
At a recent antisemitism event in Washington DC, he pledged to protect Jewish students on American campuses. “Here is what I will do to defeat antisemitism and defend our Jewish citizens in America,” he declared. “My first week back in the Oval Office my Administration will inform every College president that if you do not end antisemitic propaganda they will lose their accreditation and federal support.”
He announced that he “will inform every educational institution in our land that if they permit violence, harassment or threats against Jewish students the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.
“It’s very important Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law and they’re going to get it. At the same time, my Administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students and Jewish people on American streets.”
When back in the White House, Trump announced that he would direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination “under the guise of equity” and will advance a measure to have schools that continue these illegal and unjust policies fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.
Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms, the Stand Columbia Society, which is dedicated to restoring the university’s “excellence,” has identified a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university. They estimate Columbia could lose out on $3.5 billion in federal funding should they face government retaliation.
The most likely action, according to the group, would be for the government to slow down on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students by curbing issuance of student visas.
Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money. Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action.
Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, colour, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews.
Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI.
Columbia, for its part, already faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. (Among other major universities, Harvard faces two, and the University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list.)
“These problems have existed for some time,” a contributing member of Stand Columbia, Alexandra Zubko, who is a Columbia graduate, contends. “This might be the moment that administrators look in the mirror and decide that they can’t let them continue.”
“All we need to do is listen to what President Trump has said during his campaign to understand that this administration will be serious about enforcing anti discrimination laws in ways that could be problematic to those institutions that have been getting a free pass for too long,” Marcus has said.
With Trump promising to make higher education “great again” once he returns to office this coming January, American universities will face increasing pressure to comply with his administration, if they don’t want to lose billions in federal support.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
World Jewish News
Antisemitism is a Problem Even on Tranquil PEI

By HENRY SREBRNIK (May 30, 2025) At the end of May the Jewish community here on Prince Edward Island met informally with a member of the RCMP to express our worries regarding rising antisemitism. We are very small, some 100 people, and with little visible presence, so it’s not surprising there’s little overt anti-Jewish activity, compared to everywhere else.
Unlike in other provinces, there was never a mass migration of Jews to PEI. The earliest record of a Jewish person on the island is from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Jewish community formally organized itself. Most Jews here are “come from away,” as non-island born people are called. We have few roots and families here. Most Islanders don’t even know we exist.
PEI is a quiet place, and even the antisemites are almost invisible — though, as people at the meeting shared their stories about antisemitic signs on telephone poles, house windows with “from the river to the sea” placards facing the street, reports from some parents about problematic teachers in schools, and so on, they are out there.
For example, an event in Charlottetown last September, on the International Day of Peace, a United Nations-sanctioned holiday, was organized by the local Ukrainian community to protest Russia’s war against their country. Although it had nothing to do with the ongoing war in Gaza, nor was it meant to, yet there were more Palestinian than Ukrainian flags in evidence among the attendees, most of whom came out to make sure Gaza would not be “ignored.”
Our two independent downtown cinemas, which usually host art and foreign films, ran pro-Palestinian movies recently – with, apparently, significant turnouts. Despite City Cinema management having been told that the propaganda being disseminated at the theatre — they were showing the movie “No Other Land,” about life on the West Bank — is highly objectionable to our community, their failure to remove it was extremely troubling. Their lobby had a full display of pro-Palestinian material, a Palestinian flag across their counter, and a Palestinian representative accosting everyone entering the lobby with solicitations for money. At the Tivoli, they presented “The Encampments,” which explores the various pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 on American university campuses. This may not seem like much to people in Montreal, Toronto, or Winnipeg, but here it was a big deal.
During the recent federal election, the website VotePalestine.ca listed more than 330 candidates across the country who expressed “full” endorsement of their “Palestine Platform.” It demanded broad Government of Canada sanctions on anything connected to Israel, including “cultural and academic exchanges.” VotePalestine is closely associated with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), one of the central organizers of Canadian anti-Israel blockades and street demonstrations.
Almost all the endorsers in the country were in the Green Party or among the New Democrats, but it included 19 Liberals and two Bloc Québécois. (No Conservatives.) On PEI, six candidates endorsed the platform, including, in Charlottetown, Liberal incumbent MP Sean Casey. The other five were running for the Greens or NDP.
Casey was the only Liberal on PEI to sign the VotePalestine pledge. The other three Liberals on the island did not. (The Liberals won all four of the island’s seats.)
There are very few Muslims on PEI, and most are Iranians, Kosovars, Somalis, South Asians, and Sudanese. Few are Middle Eastern Arabs. I can guess with almost certainty that they support the Palestinian movement, but they are not especially strident about it. They are immigrants, many who don’t speak English or French, and so have a modest degree of influence.
A more significant group of anti-Israel activists are people who see the devastation in Gaza and blame Israel for everything; obviously a streak of old-fashioned antisemitism is responsible for their one-sided tenderness for Gazans and lack of sympathy for Israelis, even after October 7. They are involved in island peace committees and church groups and write letters to the newspapers. They have more social visibility and move the needle in an anti-Jewish direction.
But, as elsewhere, the third and most influential people are the ones in the universities, where for the past 40 years, here as everywhere, they have inculcated generations of students with very fully-developed ideological theories about Israel being uniquely evil, an apartheid settler-colonial “white” supremacist racist and imperialist country, and as such an oppressive enemy of all Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples (as propounded by the academics who write articles on so-called “intersectionalism.”) Israel is, to them, the current embodiment of fascism. These toxic left-wing ideologies are a very danger to the continued existence of the Jewish state.
Their disseminators are many of the professors at Columbia, Harvard, McGill, Michigan, the University of Toronto, York, and so very many other universities — some even at little UPEI — who deny they are antisemites but rather “anti-Zionists,” and view that battle as being part of a larger anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle. They wear keffiyehs as their modern form of left- wing identity, after it came into widespread symbolic use when adapted by Yasser Arafat, by the hijacker Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and by other leading figures in multiple intifadas, globalized and otherwise.
The only framework many students have been given for viewing the world by them is the neo-Marxist vision of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” which they neatly apply to Israel and Palestine. As Kathleen Hayes, a former member of an ultra-left Party for Socialism and Liberation, the group to which the murderer in Washington DC belonged, wrote in “Witness to Jihad,” Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, May 25, 2025, today’s students “learned it in the universities, from professors who repackaged Marxism to resonate in our modern age, using the Jews and Israel as their instruments of choice. But beyond the focus on Jews, this Manichean worldview declares entire classes of people reactionary and evil and suggests they ultimately must be eliminated for the sake of human betterment.”
Israeli violence is the violence that maintains a neo-colonial military occupation and inequality. Palestinian violence is the inevitable response to that; therefore it will only end when the occupation “from the river to the sea” — a call to destroy a sovereign state — ends. The oppressor can never be the victim. Within that narrative, the oppressed sometimes strike back brutally — but this is justified by the greater and more enduring brutality of the oppressor. That is why they justify what happened on October 7, 2023.
So the man who recently murdered the two Israeli embassy officials in Washington DC might say he has nothing against Jews, he just wants a “Free, Free Palestine” to replace the illegitimate Zionist entity. He might even point to Jews in Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, as evidence.
But given how intertwined Jews and Judaism are with the Land of Israel, culturally, emotionally, historically, religiously, and now with the state itself, it is really, for most of us, a distinction without a difference. And rightly so. And this is what we are up against.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
World Jewish News
Israel’s “starvation plan” for Gaza.

The world rushes to judgement
By GREGORY MASON (May 28, 2025) Israel’s re-imposition of a blockade on food and other necessities of life flowing into Gaza produced the expected hail of condemnation from the usual suspects. Typical was the reaction by Alex de Waal writing on UnHerd (May 22, 2025), a blog that prides itself on swimming against the current. De Wael writes:
“It seems monstrous, as we watch children in Gaza wasting before our eyes. But in truth, the weaponisation of food in counterinsurgency is nothing new.”
He continues to place Israel’s current blockage in the same category as infamous starvation programmes intended to demoralize a population, such as the British campaign of the fifties to suppress the Malayan counterinsurgency. This is a crude characterization of Israeli goals and motivations for the renewed military push into Gaza and the blockade on food aid.
Benny Morris, the noted Israeli historian, also expressed doubts about this strategy, although in a more nuanced tone than de Wael. Writing in Quillette magazine (May 24, 2025), he stated:
“Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip.”
And more concretely on the withdrawal of food, fuel and medical supplies on March 2, 2025, he writes,
“Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children, though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving,”
The allegation that Israel has starved the Gaza population is a fabrication. According to the World Food Program, 94.000 tons of food can feed one million people for four months. During the first months of 2025, up to the most recent Israeli blockade, Gaza received 380,000 tons of supplies, sufficient to feed its population of 2.1 million for eight months. What happened to the extra supplies?
In a word, Hamas intercepted the supplies, allowed some to dribble to the civilian population, but then sold most to local merchants at widely inflated prices, to pay salaries to its fighters and acquire more military equipment. This expropriation has been an open secret for years. Hamas has diverted all the well-meaning aid from the West to create the military infrastructure and to support the lavish lifestyles of its political leadership in Qatar. For example, the late Ismail Haniyeh was estimated to have a net worth of $4 – $6 billion at the time of his assassination.
The current Israeli call-up of 30,000 reservists and deployment of regular troops into Gaza was triggered by the refusal of Hamas to agree to the release of 10 hostages, the cessation of all hostilities, and to lay down its arms. It did not occur out of a vacuum.
Israel’s stated goals for the current action in Gaza are to recover all hostages (estimated dead (39) and alive (20), control of Gaza militarily, the complete elimination of Hamas, and forcing the civilian population into areas where they can receive food aid without interference.
Notably, while the Geneva Convention requires all combatants to care for civilian populations, if one party subverts the distribution of aid, the other parties are no longer obligated to provide food aid. Under this criterion, the diversion of aid by Hamas appears to have obviated Israel’s legal requirement to distribute aid to Gaza,
But legality and political reality diverge especially when it comes to Israel. Quite simply, Israel has always struggled with public relations and communication. In contrast, the messages of Hamas have a fertile field of skepticism by much of Western media that seems ready to believe the worst of Israeli intentions. The recent statements of Starmer, Macron, and Carney neatly capture this deep confusion among Western leaders. Recent developments regarding food supplies to Gaza may force these virtue signalers to reconsider their stance; however, that’s a slim chance.
A hopeful development, if anything about Gaza can be promising, is the creation of a US-based NGO, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which will manage food distribution to the civilian population under the protection of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). After initial glitches triggered by Hamas interference, aid appears to be flowing to the civilian population. IDF reports cautiously claim that the limited capacity of Hamas to impede food distribution, as well as increased boldness of the population to defy Hamas, indicate its weakness.
As with everything about Gaza, the food aid situation is volatile, but some grounds exist for cautious optimism that mass starvation has been averted.
World Jewish News
What would the late Yoram Hamizrachi have made of the lack of discussion of Israeli government policies within our Jewish community?

By BERNIE BELLAN Many readers are undoubtedly aware of the name “Yoram Hamizrachi,” a.k.a. Yoram East. Yoram was a big man and his somewhat menacing appearance belied his warm nature. For several years Yoram was also a columnist for the Jewish Post – when my late brother, Matt, was editor.
Yoram Hamizrachi was born in Jerusalem, Israel on February 20, 1942. He worked for many years as a newspaper, radio, and TV journalist for Israeli and foreign media in Israel and abroad (South Africa, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Germany).
Yoram also spent many years of his life in the service of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). As a reserve officer, he took part in the Battle of Jerusalem during the Six-Days War. After the war of Atonement in 1973, he moved with his family to northern Israel where he rejoined the IDF and became the first Israeli commander of the now defunct South Lebanon Security Belt (from Mount Hermon in the east to the Mediterranean in the west).
Yoram immigrated to Canada (Winnipeg) in 1982 and in 1984 played a crucial role in the rescue of Ethiopian Jews – ‘The Lost Tribe’.
Premiers, mayors, elected and high-level officials from all levels of government actively sought out Yoram’s wise counsel on many issues. He was a personal advisor to several Canadian foreign ministers on counterterrorism and a sought-after expert on terrorism, instructing courses for the Canadian and US military and police forces across North America.
Throughout his time in Winnipeg, he was a leading voice of Zionism and defender of Israel, and he initiated the annual Remembrance Day service for Jewish veterans.
But Yoram was also an iconoclast, often challenging the accepted wisdom of the day. In May 1991, shortly after the first Gulf War, during which a coalition of forces led by the U.S. expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait – which Iraq had invaded in 1990, Yoram spoke to a gathering at the Gwen Secter Centre.
The event was sponsored by the United Jewish People’s Order. (In fact, Hamizrachi spoke several times at events sponsored by UJPO. He also spoke on occasion to the Winnipeg chapter of “Peace Now.”)
To be sure, while Hamizrachi was an advocate for peace between Israel and her Arab neighbours, he was also totally realistic about the obstacles that stood in the way of peace.
At that May 1991 talk, my late brother noted how controversial some of Hamizrachi’s views were – and how eager several in the audience that day were to pose questions to Hamizrachi.
The title of Matt’s article was “The question askers’ take on Yoram Hamizrachi’, with the subtitle: “When the provocative former Jewish Post columnist spoke to a local Jewish crowd, some were ready and willing to challenge him.”
Here are some excerpts from that article:
‘The ‘question askers’ were out in full force May 13 for Yoram Hamizrachi’s lecture on the Gulf War and its aftermath.
“The question askers in Winnipeg’s Jewish community aren’t always the same, although three or four show up at almost every community event where Israel is the topic.
“They come partly to hear the lecture. But at least as important is the ‘question and answer session’ that follows.
“The burly Hamizrachi has a controversial reputation in Winnipeg’s Jewish community.
During the time he was a columnist for the Jewish Post, Matt wrote, “He delighted in taking aim at Israeli targets some more conservative elements in Winnipeg’s Jewish community considered off limits – subjects like some of the more bizzare practices of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox.”
At one point during his talk, Hamizrachi took aim at then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, saying “Shamir is contributing to President George Bush’s heart condition: ‘Every time his hear beats, it goes Shamir, Shamir’.”
“But when the speaker aimed a more stinging barb at Shamir, he fell into a trap,” Matt continued. “The ‘question askers’ were ready and waiting.
” ‘Shamir is still stubborn and vicious,’ Hamizrachi said. ‘His agenda isn’t changed – It’s ‘We love peace, we want to negotiate peace. We’d like to have peace with the Palestinians, but what our conditions? Our conditions are that nothing will change.’
” ‘Why don’t you criticize the Syrian leader?’ a heavyset, whitehaired man in the audience bellowed.
” ‘ What do you think of dividing Jerusalem?’ someone else in the audience demanded – ignoring calls from the somewhat timid moderator to ‘wait for the question and answer session.’
“Hamizrachi answered again. He was born there and fought to capture East Jerusalem during the Six Day War. He was in favour of giving that back for the sake of peace. if that were possible.
” ‘What will be the economic future of an independent Palestinian state’ another audience member asked.
” ‘I asked Arafat the same question,’ Hamizrachi replied. ‘He said: “The same as yours. The Americans are helping you (Israelis). The Arabs will help us.
” ‘Do you think Palestinian brainpower is any less than Israeli brainpower?’ Hamizrachi asked the audience.
” ‘Yes!’ a question asker snapped back.
” ‘I say it’s the same,’ Hamizrachi replied.
” “So why don’t they use it?’ the questioner demanded.
At that point the lecture and question and session were over, and audience members were “invited to stay for coffee and cookies, and ask Hamizrachi more questions.
” ‘I am ready for my execution,’ he said jokingly.”
My point in excerpting from an article written 34 years ago is to show readers that there was a time when someone extremely well respected within not just the Jewish community, but the wider community as well, could challenge accepted dogma on Israel. Here was someone who had fought for Israel, but who still respected Palestinians. Even further, he was someone who had fought to liberate Jerusalem, but who was ready to give it back for the sake of peace.
Of course, that was many years ago, but Israel had already begun its rightward tilt, which has only continued and become even more extreme under the current Netanyahu-led government. One wonders what Yoram Hamizrachi would have to say today, if he were still alive, about Israel’s never ending war in Gaza – and the absolute silence that our Jewish Federation, along with other establishment Jewish organizations, insist on maintaining when it comes to criticism of Israeli government policies?
Yoram Hamizrachi was someone who retained an open mind about issues – and insisted on looking at events through as clear a lens as possible. One can only imagine what he would have thought about how the Jewish Federation forced the resignation of BB Camp co-Executive Director Jacob Brodovsky – over Brodovsky’s alleged “anti-Israel views.” Finally, what would he have thought about how his son, Ron East, has taken it upon himself to be the self-styled “protecter” of Winnipeg Jews, also someone who is eager to swat down anything Ron labels “antiZionist?”