Remarks at a conference on Jew-hatred, which a George Washington University program hosted earlier this week, worried one of the speakers, Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement.
Some of those who addressed attendees at the event, which GW’s Program on Extremism held as part of its Antisemitism Research Initiative on Tuesday, “made suggestions that raise concerns in my mind,” Lewin told JNS.
Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, GW president Ellen Granberg and André Azoulay, a senior adviser to the Moroccan king, spoke at the event.
The Saudi cleric Mohammed Al-Issa, secretary general of the Muslim World League, spoke on a panel at the event and later said in an interview that he denounces Jew-hatred, but that comments about Oct. 7 and Israel are political speech and therefore not antisemitic, according to Lewin. (Omar Mohammed, a senior research fellow at GW and head of the initiative, told JNS only that the speaker was an “imam” without naming him.)
“The problem, of course, is that there is a whole category of harassment and discrimination that targets Jews today on the basis of our peoplehood and our shared ancestral heritage that is rooted in the land of Israel,” Lewin, a lawyer, told JNS. “That has to be recognized as hate speech targeting Jews on the basis of our Jewishness.”
The cleric’s approach risks “teaching about hate speech and deliberately carving out much of what is today’s antisemitic hate speech,” she said.
Another speaker at the event was Audrey Azoulay, former French cultural minister and former director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, according to Lewin. (A speaker list for the event wasn’t publicly available.)
Azoulay told attendees that it is important to preserve Jewish culture and heritage, but “the examples she gave were all about protecting and preserving Jewish heritage sites everywhere in the world but the Jewish ancestral homeland,” according to Lewin.
“There was nothing ever said about how the Waqf,” the body that Jordan appointed to administer the Temple Mount, “allowed the archaeology on the Temple Mount to be completely and totally destroyed when they did renovations,” Lewin said. “That’s why you have the sifting project in Israel trying to go through and at least salvage what had been discarded as garbage.”
Preserving Jewish history and heritage in Israel is “one of the things that’s necessary to counter antisemitism,” she said.
Mohammed, the GW initiative head and organizer of the event, disputed Lewin’s characterization.
The speaker who talked about preserving Jewish heritage and culture “spoke about preservation of Jewish heritage globally and Israel is included,” he told JNS. He added that the remarks of the “imam,” who spoke in Arabic, got “lost in translation.”
“As a native Arabic speaker, I recall him saying he suggests creating a lab to study hate,” Mohammed said. “He repeatedly said he denounces antisemitism and Oct. 7.”
“We don’t agree with everything the panelists and speakers say,” he told JNS. “They represent themselves and not our initiative.”
Lewin told JNS that hearing from other speakers at the event, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Harmeet Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, was “very reassuring” and “delightful.”
Dhillon told attendees that the federal government is engaged in “a relentless charge to root out antisemitism wherever we find it in these United States,” and that the Justice Department applied a “pioneering application of the FACE Act,” the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, “to defend Jewish synagogues that paved the way for its use,” the initiative stated.
“For too long groups and individuals acted as if they were above the law when attacking people of faith,” Dhillon added, per organizers.
Cruz said that he is “going to do everything within my power, use every force of strength I have, to utterly and completely defeat this rising antisemitism on the right.”
“If you’re willing to say the name Nick Fuentes but not Tucker Carlson, that speaks volumes,” he told attendees, per organizers. “Fuentes was not on Tucker to be challenged. Instead, Fuentes said his mission in life was to destroy ‘global Jewry.’ That’s not subtle.”
Lewin told JNS that the senator was “willing to get up and condemn antisemitism not only from the left, but also from within his own party on the right,” which was “crucially important,” she told JNS.
“Seeing someone who has the ability to articulate that and call that out forcefully was important,” she said.
Lewin was also pleased that the conference tried to represent a “whole of society approach” to fighting Jew-hatred.
“You need the Muslims and you need the Christians and the Hindus and the Sikhs and all of the different faith groups and all of the different political groups to recognize and understand it,” she said.
Lewin told JNS that there is “a very deliberate and determined effort to erase and deny Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish people’s history and heritage in the land of Israel” and that universities need to understand that Jewish students have been “shunned” and “excluded” for being Zionists.
Mohammed told JNS that he heard that “people were really satisfied with the outcome of the conference.”
“The conference is about creating a platform where antisemitism is discussed not just as a matter of dispute, or as a question and a problem, but also to think through possible solutions,” he said.
He told JNS that Dhillon’s remarks were one of the highlights and that Cruz’s speech was “very important.”
“They were both committed to combating antisemitism, and I do believe also that having this kind of commitment is an encouragement also to other people to take such steps and to move forward toward a more collective strategy to combat antisemitism,” he said.
Mohammed added that “our platform is open to everyone.”
“Whoever wants to discuss and talk about antisemitism, we are open to listen,” he said. “We are here to provide that platform to discuss it.”
Noah Pollak, a senior adviser at the U.S. Education Department, told JNS that he said at the event that “we are overinvested in the idea that enforcement in civil rights laws is going to get us out of this problem.”
“I pointed out that the Department of Education and the federal agencies are not set up to be the civil rights oversight and enforcement bodies for hundreds of universities across the country,” he said. “We don’t have the capacity to do that.”
Pollak said that his remarks at the event weren’t meant to criticize the department’s civil rights office but to be a “clarification for that audience.”
The enforcement work of the civil rights office is “incredibly time consuming and labor intensive,” according to Pollak. “There’s no easy way out here where it’s like, ‘Oh we’re just going to throw OCR at the problem, and 10 years later everything will be good.’”
“It was never designed to do that. It can’t do that. You’d have to make it 10 times bigger,” he said. “What is needed is for the universities themselves to be pressured into and to want to undertake real governance reforms to change how they operate and to change the kind of people who are on their campuses—the kind of faculty they hire, the kind of students they admit.”
“That’s what’s going to actually deal with the problem,” Pollak told JNS.
