Trump’s most original idea? Redefining antisemitism
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.
In 2020, which seems a long time ago, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.