r/moderatepolitics • u/awaythrowawaying • 2d ago

News Article US Justice Department sues UCLA alleging antisemitic educational environment

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-justice-department-sues-ucla-alleging-antisemitic-educational-environment-2026-05-26/
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u/oath2order Maximum Malarkey 2d ago

Yeah okay.

We'll see what happens. It is okay to be pro-Palestine. It is not okay to be pro-Hamas. This seems like an easy case, but as we've seen with this DOJ's inability to indict a sub sandwich, I have the feeling it will be bungled.

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u/lostroadrunner22 2d ago

I think having ‘Jewish Exclusion Zones’ is wrong. Call me crazy

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u/justafutz 2d ago

Reminder for those denying the above that a federal judge opened his opinion on this subject like this:

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this.”

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u/notapersonaltrainer 2d ago edited 2d ago

The casual normalization and contempt about the push back is the freakiest part.

No progressive campus would tolerate arab/muslim exclusion zones that force students to denounce Islam while chanting "Globalize the Crusade" "There is only One Solution, Crusade revolution!" or "From the Caucasus to the Red Sea, Mesopotamia will be free!". No one would unironically stick up for this with "but but Crusade just means 'taking the cross'". Or defend leadership condoning "context dependent arab genocide" on national television.

There would be mass expulsions, department purges, and careers nuked for life if a fraction of this targeted any other ethnicity or religion.

There is only one ethnic superminority for whom this kind of farcical treatment is normalized, defended, and celebrated while its whistleblowers are the ones treated as the problem.

It is so normalized that many can't even conceive the valid & overdue lashback without unapologetically invoking more antisemitic "string pulling" tropes.

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u/Mantergeistmann 2d ago

unironically arguing "Crusade just means 'taking the cross'"

That one at least has a bit of scholarly argument in support of it, but I'd imagine the vast majority of Deus Vult-Bros have never engaged with it, and certainly would not undertake any difficult or dangerous task in the name of penance themselves, "for the remission of sins".

the faithful went to war to defend Christians, to punish the attackers, and to right terrible wrongs. As Riley-Smith has written elsewhere, crusading was seen as an act of love—specifically the love of God and the love of neighbor. By pushing back Muslim aggression and restoring Eastern Christianity, the Crusaders were—at great peril to themselves—imitating the Good Samaritan. Or, as Innocent II told the Knights Templar, “You carry out in deeds the words of the gospel, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

But the Crusades were not just wars. They were holy wars, and that is what made them different from what came before. They were made holy not by their target but by the Crusaders’ sacrifice. The Crusade was a pilgrimage and thereby an act of penance. When Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, he created a model that would be followed for centuries. Crusaders who undertook that burden with right intention and after confessing their sins would receive a plenary indulgence. The indulgence was a recognition that they undertook these sacrifices for Christ, who was crucified again in the tribulations of his people.

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u/notapersonaltrainer 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes, today's Western Crusades curriculum basically ignores the context that the Middle East was largely Judeo-Christian and was conquered through centuries of Islamic crusades, along with swaths of Europe, before Christendom cooperated and mounted a far more limited counteroffensive. But since crusade is white-coded and jihad brown-coded, the only the crusaders are the baddies.

But that's a whole other tangent in the historical double-standards rabbit hole I didn't want to go down for brevity.

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u/Kawhi_Leonard_ 21h ago

That is undoubtedly the worst map I've ever seen. Where's the Reconquista? Where's the Byzantine campaigns in Anatolia? What about the Baltic Crusades or the numerous battles across the Russian Steppe?

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u/Plastastic Social Democrat 1d ago edited 1d ago

That map is so ridiculous, you only count (some) major crusade battles and you counter with every minor skirmish in which muslims were involved.

EDIT: You might also want to ask Jews in the 11th century how 'Judeo-Christian' the Middle-East was considering the fact that there were more pogroms than you could shake a stick at.

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u/Mantergeistmann 1d ago

It also seems to be limited to a certain number of Crusades... I believe it was the 4th Crusade that sacked Constantinople? Plus I think some various Eastern European Crusades.

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u/Plastastic Social Democrat 1d ago

The Northern Crusades, yeah. You could also count the Hussite wars and the Albigensian Crusade.

If you really want to be fair and adhere to the same standards as the 'Muslim conquest battles' there's countless other conflicts you can include as well.

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u/TintedApostle 1d ago

The rest of the writing is as follow: "“Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters."

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u/justafutz 1d ago

Yes, and the next sentence is the federal judge saying they are wrong.

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u/BaudrillardsMirror 1d ago

> they refused to denounce their faith

Kind of crazy for a judge to conflate judaism and zionism to this level. The students didn't have to denounce their faith to enter the area, they had to denounce Israel.

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u/justafutz 1d ago

It's kind of crazy to read about the creation of Jew-free zones on campus and say "Ah, but they just had to denounce Israel!", ignoring all the history, what the encampment organizers actually did, the religious significance, and more.

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u/ATLEMT 1d ago

They shouldn’t have had to denounce anything.

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u/ArcBounds 1d ago

Can you clarify what happened? Were the students barred from classes, dorms, etc? Did the university ask them to reject their religion? What specifically happened and who did what. I gather there were student protestors, university officials, and Jewish students. What did each group do? It seems to me that it is a tough situation between the 1st amendment and allowing people to be safe.

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u/justafutz 1d ago

Can you clarify what happened? Were the students barred from classes, dorms, etc?

This report by the UCLA Antisemitism Task Force is helpful. Another useful place to look is the DOJ complaint in this case.

Jewish students were blocked by the encampment and protestors from entering Powell Library on campus, as well as Royce Hall, where some classes are held. Students wearing a kippah (yarmulke) or Jewish star (Star of David) were turned away from Royce Hall and Powell Library. Others were turned away unless they said Israel should be destroyed, which would deny Jews self-determination and for the vast majority of Jews (we're talking over 90%+ worldwide) would be the same as saying "I don't believe in my faith", as the task force notes.

UCLA itself did not block the students. The allegation is not that they did so. It's that they allowed a hostile environment against Jews to be enacted on campus and took no action to stop it, despite the underlying issues violating their campus policies. This is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The university previously claimed, in another lawsuit brought by students, that it had no obligation to intervene and couldn't be held liable because it didn't run the encampment. But this is, as a federal judge already ruled, contrary to civil rights law, which says if you're a taxpayer-funded institution, you can't just let people freely block students based on their religion or race or nationality on your campus, refuse to enforce the rules, and then claim "well it wasn't me doing it!".

UCLA took no action to disperse the encampment or guarantee free action. It also has/had an office dedicated to complaints about bigotry and discrimination, and it received over a hundred complaints and took no action on any of them. Students who reported being assaulted by the protestors or others and called "k-words" and similar were brushed off by university officials, who either downplayed the assaults and language or ignored them entirely.

UCLA declined to enforce its own rules to prevent this hostile environment. UCLA also refused to report any of its own students or cooperate with authorities when those students were sought for criminal activities, including assaulting Jews. UCLA is not required to cooperate of course, but it is part of a pattern of protecting those who were assaulting and harassing Jewish students, and proves deliberate indifference to the hostile environment.

As the DOJ complaint says, "Although students and faculty have a right to peacefully protest, they may do so only in accordance with UCLA's lawful time, place, and manner restrictions," but UCLA failed to enforce its rules at all, "resulting in failure to protect the Constitutional rights of Jews on campus."

There is also a double-standard, which helps show that the school is not merely motivated by the First Amendment. The school generally cracks down against Jews. Here is testimony from one person on UCLA's campus recorded in the task force report:

People on campus are allowed to wear identity concealing masks and harass Jewish students and faculty with impunity while the campus community calls them ‘peaceful’ and comes to their defense. Meanwhile I know Jewish faculty who have been written up for microaggressions, as Jews are attacked for weaponizing antisemitism against free speech and racial equity simply for speaking out against civil rights violations. Insanity reigns.

Jews are being punished for complaining about antisemitism by faculty and administrators, while those assaulting, harassing, and excluding Jews are given free rein.

If you want a full rundown, I suggest you read both the complaint and the report. They contain mountains of information. The complaint repeats the report in portions, but also has its own additional information. But it is not really a tough situation. When you have Jewish students being punished by administrators for "micro aggressions" for complaining about antisemitism, while antisemitism is not being punished, and you have Jewish students being physically assaulted and intimidated and harassed on campus while administrators do nothing and stand by and watch (which they do not do when it's any other group being targeted), it's clear there's a huge problem. Whether that's enough to show deliberate indifference is always a tough fact-specific question, because UCLA will undoubtedly try (again) to plead ignorance, or settle, or claim they couldn't do anything about it, but that doesn't change that there was antisemitism on campus that violated their rules, even if they get away with arguing they were just powerless to stop it (absurd as that would be).

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u/markantona 11h ago

I was a UCLA student at the time and it was not a Jewish exclusion zone. I was not allowed into that area and am not Jewish. Literally majority of people weren’t. I tried to walk to class through it and they were turning around everyone. There were a few Jewish students that would go on Fox News, post on social media, and openly lie about the conditions to build a narrative. I knew multiple of them personally.

On top of this, the encampment started as a peaceful area people could enter and leave freely. The quad was open and you could walk in and around it. One night, counter protesters came in and started launching fireworks and assaulting people in the encampment with bats. Meanwhile, the news helicopter showed a line of police cars at chick fil a on Westwood Blvd. They refused to respond to it, which is why the encampment blocked off areas as they had to fend for themselves as they were assaulted.

I have no doubt there was some level of antisemitism and pro Hamas beliefs within the encampment. But it’s also inaccurate to say that it was a Jewish exclusionary zone because it wasn’t.

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u/justafutz 3h ago

The antisemitism task force on UCLA’s campus and multiple others say you’re wrong, including people I personally know, and to call them peaceful is astounding when there are multiple documented assaults by them, including the day before the clash with counterprotestors.