President Biden on Tuesday marked Holocaust Remembrance Day by delivering his most forceful condemnation of campus antisemitism to date, bowing to the mounting pressure for him to address rising anti-Israel protest chaos and harassment of Jewish students and faculty.
Mr. Biden denounced the “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and across the world” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Day of Remembrance Celebration at the U.S. Capitol.
“On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class,” Mr. Biden said. “Antisemitism. Antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.”
He drew a distinction between peaceful protest and hateful rhetoric, saying that “America will respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech.”
“Debate and disagree, protest peacefully, make our voices heard,” Mr. Biden said. “I understand. That’s America, but there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats or violence of any kind.”
He took aim at the pro-Palestinian protests roiling U.S. college campuses, which prompted more than 2,000 arrests nationwide in the last two weeks and caused Columbia University and the University of Southern California to cancel their main-stage graduations in favor of small-school ceremonies.
“Whether against Jews or anyone else, violent attacks, destroying property, is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law, and we’re not a lawless country,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re a civil society. We uphold the rule of law. And no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.”
The White House paired the speech with the announcement of “several new actions to counter the abhorrent rise of Antisemitism in the United States,” building on the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism released last year.
The actions included the letter that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent Friday to 5,000 higher-education institutions giving examples of antisemitic discrimination, including Jewish students being harassed while walking on campus and being told to “go back to Poland.”
Both of those have happened in the last few weeks as anti-Israel protesters erect “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” on university lawns, refusing to leave until their demands for colleges to divest from Israel are met.
In addition, eight cabinet-level agencies clarified in writing for the first time that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits certain forms of antisemitism, Islamophobic, and related forms of discrimination.”