In Trump v. Harvard, the stakes involve more than antisemitism

By Jonathan S. Tobin

When Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, noted that President Donald Trump was being “far more aggressive” in his campaign against Harvard than he’s been against “a Russian dictator,” he wasn’t wrong.

Whatever the merits of Trump’s approach to the latter conflict, which centers on efforts to end the illegal and brutal war Russian President Vladimir Putin launched against Ukraine three years ago, the idea that there’s something immoral about the administration’s campaign against Harvard is as indefensible as any attempt to justify Moscow’s behavior. Or, one might add, as inexcusable as the fact that most people at Harvard seem to think that the real victims on their campus are wealthy students from abroad who use their entry to America to engage in antisemitism and not the Jews that they have been targeting.

Sympathy for foreign students, not Jews

As the placards and signs at the Ivy League school’s graduation ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., indicated, along with their support for Palestinian Arabs and their opposition to Israel’s existence, student activists are adopting the cause of international students as the nation’s newest oppressed group. But like Harvard’s own defense of the toxic culture that it has embraced, the idea that the vast number of foreigners who are attending the campus and so many other top American schools are deserving of sympathy in their battle against Trump is a distortion of the truth.