US Justice Department sues UCLA alleging antisemitic educational environment

[u/awaythrowawaying]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-justice-department-sues-ucla-alleging-antisemitic-educational-environment-2026-05-26/

[u/nycbetches]

You should read the article I linked. The university had declared the encampment illegal and gave the protestors ~8 hours (overnight) to dismantle it. The counterprotestors attacked at the beginning of those 8 hours. The university police were standing by and, according to videos, did nothing to stop the attack. Why? I would think this would also be something the federal government would want to investigate. 

Surely your argument isn’t that citizens are entitled to take the law into their own hands when campus officials have clearly set forth a path forward…

 What’s notable is that one side was enforcing a “Jew free zone” on campus, and the other was responding to that.

The encampment they attacked wasn’t a “Jew-free zone,” in fact, there were Jewish protestors inside it, they had a seder…

You are conflating several different things. It is true that some people in the encampment refused to allow access through the encampment to people who were supportive of Israel (not just Jewish people). It is not true that the encampment was declared a “Jew-free zone” or that all of campus was a “Jew-free zone”. It’s important to stick to the facts in these discussions.

[u/justafutz → u/nycbetches]

That’s one version of the story about a single clash. That’s disagreed with by other sources. I think this timeline is important. I trust the NYT as much as a wet mop, considering its brutally awful coverage of this issue. The timeline is helpful. For example, it lists out how in the days before the clash, the encampment had repeatedly harassed and violently attacked Jewish students and others. The day before the clash, a Jewish female was assaulted and left bleeding from her head and admitted to the ER. She was kicked and pulled by the hair by the encampment’s participants.

It lists how that the encampment was declared illegal, but not cleared, on May 1, before the clash, because of their continued attacks on students that even UCLA could no longer ignore after weeks of violence and harassment. The dispersal order came **after** the clash, not before. While the timeline ultimately agrees on who instigated that specific clash, that doesn’t change much when you look at the context and the fact that if UCLA had protected its Jewish students’ civil rights for weeks prior, there would never have been a clash at all.

But it’s weird to talk about the clash without mentioning that for weeks, Jewish students were excluded from campus based on their beliefs with the creation of a “Jew free zone” on campus. That’s not my view, it’s the view of a federal judge, and the view of UCLA, which admitted as much.

We’re not about to do tokenizing Jews to make the point somehow okay. The encampment and the students in it spent weeks blocking Jewish students and faculty from campus and from their classes. That’s a civil rights violation. Pointing to tokenization by those Jews who did denounce their faith to join is irrelevant. This is like saying that if an encampment targets and blocks Black students from class until they say “we support segregation”, it’s okay because a few fringe Black students have supported resegregation (which is, believe it or not, a real thing). It’s nonsense. Imagine setting up an encampment that forces visibly Muslim students to denounce Islam, or agree to globalize the murder of Muslims, and everyone says it’s okay because they had some token maybe-Muslims host Eid inside.

The normalization of antisemitism is bad.

You don’t get to exclude Jewish students for weeks from their campus unless they’re willing to denounce their faith. A federal judge made that clear and UCLA didn’t dispute that it was happening. I have no idea why you’re suggesting it would be okay. I haven’t said it’s okay to be a vigilante. You can actually read above where I said that violence should be investigated, and *was* investigated.

What is unusual is that I can say that, but you are excusing Jew free zones on UCLA’s campus by tokenization. Not good.

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