u/TrackerOneA

Sources:

https://www.ms.now/news/frame-up-whistleblower-says-probes-into-antisemitism-at-colleges-were-ploys-to-harass-and-strip-millions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQ64YQ5cBg

Report (3 universities were investigated; Columbia, Harvard, and Brown):

• https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/08.17.26-title-vi-whistleblower-disclosure-for-congress.pdf
• Key Findings:
  • Investigators believed Trump DOJ had decided the universities were guilty before the investigations were completed
  • Little to no factual basis of antisemitism
    • For Columbia, officials relied on unsupported allegations from news reports and lawsuit claims and on constitutionally protected speech
    • Investigators found no Title VI violation at Brown, but the whistleblower says administration was subject to pressure from 'outside stakeholders demanding action"
    • For Harvard, officials pursued freezing billions in funding and other settlement demands before the investigation had established Title VI violations.
  • Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official Daniel Shieh noted "the goal is compliance, but pulling money is the tool," communicating that the funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative finding
  • Investigators repeatedly warned that the government was treating First Amendment-protected political speech as evidence of antisemitism

Previous DOJ whistleblowers saying the Trump administration's campus antisemitism inquisition is a farce:

• LA Times - Ex-Trump DOJ lawyers say 'fraudulent' UC antisemitism probes led them to quit
• JOC - Former DOJ attorneys for Trump UC antisemitism investigations quit, calling them 'sham', 'fraudulent', 'political hit job', etc.

Further Context:

• JOC - Post-10/7 only 1 of 102 [126 since 2004] college antisemitism complaints raises claims unrelated to Israel criticism. 78% were filed by pro-Israel orgs as complainants or on their behalf. 15 investigations open based on a single conservative activist with no affiliation with any of the schools.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/world/video/palestinian-american-returns-home-west-bank-intldsk-digivid

https://x.com/JDiamond1/status/2089764310566494393

A NSW Supreme Court judge has delivered a sweeping rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, labelling it “verbose and imprecise”.

Justice Desmond Fagan’s initial criticism of the definition came in a decision rejecting the NSW government’s bid to place a young Sydney man under a terrorism supervision order, after finding prosecutors had failed to establish that his vandalism was evidence of a future terrorism risk.

But in the judgment, to be published today, Fagan went considerably further, taking aim at the IHRA definition itself and questioning its use as a guide to whether political language directed at Israel should be regarded as antisemitic.

The pro-Israel lobby, spearheaded by antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal, is pushing for the integration of the IHRA definition across all government levels, the media and education.

The Albanese government acquiesced to the lobby’s demands following the Bondi massacre, and has been steadily rolling it out across the public service while funding Segal’s initiatives to embed the IHRA definition within education.

IHRA ‘detached from reality’

The NSW Supreme Court decision is the latest setback to the lobby’s attempts to stifle criticism of Israel, amid widespread disapproval in Australia of Israel over its ongoing genocide in Gaza, its violence in the West Bank, invasion of southern Lebanon and attack on Iran.

Fagan said the IHRA formulation did not reflect the established Australian meaning of antisemitism and described it as an attempt to “repurpose” the term to encompass both hatred of Jews and criticism of Israel.

He said the definition could not realistically be attributed to the ordinary, reasonably informed Australian, adding that “the IHRA proposal is detached from the reality of the common usage and understanding of antisemitism in this country”.

Citing a Pew Research poll in June, Fagan said that “it would be preposterous to suggest that 79% of Australians are antisemitic because they disapprove of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians”.

He said the IHRA formulation “appears to be an attempt to repurpose the term ‘antisemitism’” as an amalgamated concept encompassing hatred towards Jews and criticism of Israel.

Zionism ‘open to criticism’

Fagan was equally forthcoming with attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“As an ideology of Jewish nationalism, Zionism is open to political discussion and criticism, notably on grounds concerning the rights of the Palestinians,” the judgement read.

This appears at odds with Segal’s antisemitism plan, which specifically highlighted anti-Zionism as potentially masking antisemitism as part of its call for IHRA to be adopted.

Fagan delivered a stinging rebuke to such assertions.

“It may well be correct that ‘most, but not all Jewish Australians’ regard Zionism as ‘a core part of their Jewish identity’,” Fagan’s judgement read. “That does not mean that anti-Zionists are hostile to that majority of Jews on account of their Jewishness; only that they hold a negative view of a political ideology with which the majority of Jews have chosen to identify.”

Limit to government power

Fagan was equally dismissive of the proposition that institutional adoption of the IHRA definition had altered the ordinary meaning of the word.

He cited former NSW Supreme Court judge Sir Stephen Spedley, who had criticised the formulation because it “fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite”.

The fact that governments and several institutions had adopted the IHRA wording did not, Fagan said, “change the established meaning of a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years”.

Instead, he said, the IHRA formulation “propounds a concept different from that which ‘antisemitism’ has long been understood to describe and appropriates that word to the novel concept”.

There was also a legal limit to the power of government policy, he said.

Parliament could enact legislation giving a familiar term a different statutory meaning. But neither the Commonwealth nor NSW parliament had done so in legislation relevant to this case.

The federal government’s adoption of the IHRA core wording as a policy for Australian Public Service workplaces therefore made no difference to the meaning the court was required to apply, Fagan said.

Promoting rejection of Israel as antisemitic

Fagan’s most pointed criticism concerned the IHRA examples dealing with Israel.

Those examples, he said, were “on the face of them” directed towards bringing within the IHRA definition “criticisms of Israel that could not be regarded as hostile to Jews as Jews”.

The result was what he described as an attempt to attach opposition to Israel to the moral force already carried by the word antisemitism.

“Its tendency, and the apparent purpose of promoting it, is to graft onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism, understood as hostility to Jews for their Jewishness, a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel,” Fagan wrote.

That distinction was central to the case.

The prosecution had argued that the Sydney man’s use of anti-Israel slogans, attendance at a pro-Palestinian protest and targeting of areas with large Jewish populations supported a finding of antisemitic motivation.

Fagan rejected the proposition that the political message could be separated from the context in which it was expressed and then treated as evidence of hatred towards Jews.

“You are treating all Jews as monolithic,” he told McDonald during the hearing.

“It’s quite wrong to treat all Jews as supporting Israel, because they don’t.”

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Hey you horrors- I’m here for the next hour answering questions about my book, Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Have at it.