Pro-Hamas protests on college campuses this fall are getting worse than last spring, according to Brooke Goldstein, the founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project and head of the End Jew Hatred Movement.
“It’s ramping up,” Goldstein told JNS. “I think that the Islamist students and the radical students feel emboldened because we’ve had several years under the prior administration—total lack of enforcement of the law.”
Schools are “tolerating a hostile environment,” according to Goldstein. “Sometimes the administrators and the teachers themselves are part of the problem,” she added. “The problem is systemic. It’s something that’s been ignored, frankly, for the last 15 to 20 years.”
Part of the problem is vast foreign funding of U.S. higher education—to the tune of at least $1 billion annually from Qatar, which not only supports colleges and universities but also K-12 education, she said.
“They have radicalized a population, an entire generation,” Goldstein said. “This is a cultural problem. It’s systemic, and I think that the American people voted to reject what they see as this extreme left, progressive ideology that involves moral equivalence with terrorism.”
As a minority group, Jews ought to “follow the playbook of the black Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s and the new and the old women’s movements,” according to Goldstein.
“It’s the same thing. It’s a combination of impact litigation, civil rights litigation, grassroots mobilization and a government that’s willing, obviously, to enforce the law,” she said. “The question is, if we replace ‘black’ or ‘gay’ or ‘Muslim’ with ‘Jew,’ can we use the same strategies and tactics to ensure that we can live in freedom and security and our children can do the same?”
“The answer is yes, we can,” she said. “That’s the beauty of this great country.”
Jews should “drop all their partisan divides and unify around a single purpose, a single goal, which is to ensure that our rights as a minority community—the oldest, most persecuted minority community in human history—our civil rights are enforced,” Goldstein said.
“This is a civil rights issue. This is, in fact, what I believe to be the greatest civil rights issue of our lifetime,” she added.
She told JNS that she is interested that there has never been a Jewish civil rights movement in U.S. history.
“How is it that we’ve always marched for others, but we’ve never marched for ourselves?” she said. “We have so many attorneys. We have incredible philanthropy. We’ve been spending this money in a strategic vacuum without learning how minority rights and civil rights movements have been successful in this country.”
Optimism amid transition
Goldstein, whose group has filed more than 180 legal actions—and, she says, has won most of its cases—sees cause for optimism with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
“We need moral clarity and we need the enforcement of the law, and I’m confident that that is what the Trump administration is going to do,” she told JNS.
Goldstein is “encouraged by President Trump’s statement that he’s going to enforce the law because I really believe that’s what it takes to curb unlawful discrimination—a willingness on behalf of the government to enforce the law already on the books.”
She thinks it’s unfortunate that the country had to learn the hard way that U.S. policy, to “just pour money into Gaza, hoping that Hamas will somehow become some sort of democratic, law-abiding, capitalist ruler,” is misguided.
“The number one foreign policy objective of the Trump administration could be to ensure that we have very good relationships and we’re close and in collaboration with strong leaders from other countries, who also express the same moral clarity about the threat and the issue and the willingness to enforce their laws domestically,” she said. “There are rewards for that.”
