Congress Must Protect Jewish Americans

October 31, 2023

Allowing a pro-terrorist, anti-Jewish movement to dominate our campuses is a direct threat to the survival of America as a constitutional republic operating under the rule of law.

by Newt Gingrich

Congress has an absolute obligation to intervene when Americans are being threatened.

The current situation in which pro-terrorist elements believe they can bully, threaten, and in some cases attack Jewish Americans is simply intolerable.

The antisemitic bias of the Joe Biden administration and many Democrats is clear in their failure to actively protect Jewish Americans – and punish and when necessary drive out of the country fanatic supporters of terrorism.

Jared Kushner caught how incredible the current disaster of American hatred for Jews is on Fox News.

“One of the ironies is that, as an American Jew, you’re safer in Saudi Arabia right now than you are on a college campus like Columbia University. I spoke at the conference [in Saudi Arabia]. They allowed me to speak freely,” he said.

Kushner’s comments reflect a sense of fear and danger being expressed by Jewish Americans in a variety of places.

At Columbia University, Jessica Brenner said:

“I feel walking on campus many people just want me to die, I have to walk around and go to my class and see someone and think they might want me to not exist or not want my people to exist — I don’t take a step without thinking about that.

“When I’m asked ‘do you feel safe at Columbia University?’, I say ‘no. I don’t feel safe.”

At The Cooper Union, protesters were reportedly “calling for the murder of Jews,” while students were barricaded into the school library after a pro-Palestine rally attempted to enter the space. One student there said, “I definitely did feel threatened when there were chants calling for the murder of Jews being chanted at me from my fellow students.”

Cornell University has had one of the most frightening sequences of threats. A Jewish student named Zoe Bernstein told CNN she and others had read numerous antisemitic posts on campus.

“This is totally unprecedented in my life and the lives of, I would say, pretty much all of my peers. … It’s really, deeply troubling and upsetting,” she said.

One of the posts called Jewish people “rats” who “need to be eliminated from Cornell” then called for people follow Jewish students and “slit their throats.”

Beyond college campuses some pro-terrorist organizations are targeting Jewish neighborhoods to shut down any sort of religious gatherings.

In a speech last weekend, President Trump made a clear case for stopping the pro-terrorist efforts:

“When I get back into office, I will put every single university and college president on notice. The American taxpayer will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers on American soil. Colleges and universities will purge the antisemitism and … pro-terrorism … or they will lose their accreditation and every last penny of federal student loans that will not be paid to them probably shouldn’t be paid to him anyway.

“Never forget the same radicals tearing down posters of Israeli hostages … are the ones tearing down statues of our American heroes to funding our police destroying our justice system and demolishing our borders…

“This is why those who chant Death to Israel, also chant always Death to America.”

The first amendment guarantees free speech, but it is not an absolute right. Leading Americans have noted the practical limitations of free speech.

Consider President Thomas Jefferson:

“A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.”

President Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of a Civil War asserted that an insurrection “in nearly one-third of the States had subverted the whole of the laws . . . Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”

Lincoln expanded on this principle when some criticized his arrest of Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Lincoln wrote that Vallandigham was arrested “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. . . . Must I shoot a simple-minded deserter, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?”

Former Attorney General and Chief American Judge at the Nuremberg Trial and Associate Justice Robert Jackson warned:

“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

And maybe the most famous example of a practical limitation of free speech is Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes assertion that:

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”\

Now, I’m not saying that people who support humanitarian aid for Gaza, or criticize the Israeli government, or voice any other political view should be silenced. I am saying if people support terrorism and acts of genocide against the Jewish people – or any people – they must be stopped.

Allowing a pro-terrorist, anti-Jewish movement to dominate our campuses and intimidate and threaten our fellow citizens is a direct threat to the survival of America as a constitutional republic operating under the rule of law. It is a cancer that will grow. It must be cut out.

Congress must adopt a series of laws to outlaw pro-terrorist and antisemitic activities.

The First Amendment is not protection for barbarians who would threaten Americans and seek to destroy the rights of their fellow citizens.

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