Who cares about free speech when Sheldon Adelson gives your party $25 million, right?
President Donald Trump planned to sign an executive order Wednesday that would effectively reclassify Judaism as both a race or nationality and a religion under federal law so that the Education Department can take direct action against what he views as anti-Semitism on college campuses, administration officials said.
The reclassification allows the Education Department, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to withhold funding from college or educational programs it believes are discriminating in an anti-Semitic way. The law states that the Education Department can take such action against a program that discriminates based "on the ground of race, color or national origin" — but not on religion.
The order comes largely in response to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians. The movement has become prominent on some campuses and resulted in actions that have left some Jewish students feeling targeted. In making the change, the Trump administration would be recognizing Jews as having a collective national origin.
Trump "will be signing an executive order on anti-Semitism to enshrine the definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance of anti-Semitism into an executive order, and clarify that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to anti-Semitic acts," a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday.
"The Domestic Policy Council began to focus on this issue in the late winter-spring of this year, when we were alarmed, frankly, at a rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric, including, unfortunately, from leading political figures," the official continued. "We looked at the data and we saw that there's been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since 2013, and we began a policy process to figure out, specifically, what we could do on the subject."
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines anti-Semitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews," though “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic."
The definition also includes "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination," which lists “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" among such denials.
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