The ongoing anti-Israel riots on our university campuses and city squares have shaken American Jews — and all defenders of Western civilization — to their core.

The mainstream media, always in the tank for vogue causes, sanitized this naked harassment under the label of “pro-Palestinian protests.”

In true extremist form, one “protestor” at George Washington University held up a sign advocating for Hitler’s “final solution” in late April.

This week, anti-Israel protestors were back at UCLA, with a new illegal encampment — the second in as many months.

A wide range of federal and local laws are on the books to lock up anti-Israel protestors, according to reports. Derek French/Shutterstock

Jews have been terrified; one Jewish parent at Columbia, withdrawing his freshman daughter in April, analogized his experience to evacuating a refugee from a war zone. 

Perhaps colleges and city centers will see a brief respite, as would-be revolutionaries jet off for summertime gigs at tony investment banks or do-goody nonprofits.

Such a respite would be nice.

But one would still be forgiven for asking the obvious question — which I’ve pondered often as a former law clerk on the US Court of Appeals and a frequent law school speaker: Why are none of these “protesters” in jail?

It is not as if legal remedies, both civil and criminal, do not exist. The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky has helpfully explained some leading options for meting out justice.

First, it’s constitutional law that aliens — legal or illegal — do not possess a First Amendment right to free speech that would prevent them from being deported for vocally supporting a US State Department-recognized Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

Each and every pro-Hamas protestor who’s not a US citizen thus can, and should, be sent packing, as 8 U.S.C. § 1201 clearly permits.

Second, much of the protestors’ behavior likely violates Section 2 of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act (42 U.S.C. § 1985), which creates a civil cause of action to sue those who “conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving . . . any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.”

Such a successful class-action civil suit — now gaining traction among Jewish leaders — wouldn’t result in jail time, but it could punish the bank accounts of thugs who went “in disguise” to advocate for Jewish genocide.

NYPD officers detain dozens of anti-Israel students at Columbia University after they barricaded themselves at the Hamilton Hall building. Anadolu via Getty Images

Government officials like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg need to do far, far more to put the anti-Israel agitators behind bars, according to critics. REUTERS

Federal prosecutors have options too.

The criminal analogue to Section 2 of the Ku Klux Klan Act is 18 U.S.C. § 241, which criminalizes conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

This has clearly been happening nationwide, but no one has lifted a finger to pursue such charges.

Nor has any federal prosecutor gone after a case of material support for a terrorist organization, proscribed by 18 U.S.C. § 2339A.

Where are the federal prosecutors?

For that matter, where is local law enforcement — especially in New York, in light of this week’s horrific bouts of antisemitic vandalism in Manhattan and Brooklyn?

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First, there is a reflexive progressive disinclination to prosecute the activist misanthropes the media sanitizes as mere “protesters.”

In Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, such a high-profile prosecution would muddy the waters for Joe Biden and hamstring his re-election efforts.

No one at Justice wants to be on the “wrong side” of an intersectional divide; far better to win over Michigan radicals than to pursue blind justice.

Billionaire George Soros (l, with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and son Alexander Soros) is the money behind much of the extre anti-Israel efforts, some have said.

Second, the most high-profile protest anarchy has transpired in deep-blue jurisdictions overseen by George Soros-funded, or otherwise very left-wing, district attorneys.

Does anyone really expect Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, for example, to bring charges against students at Columbia — or to hunt down antisemitic vandals?

Of course not.

In the case of Bragg — who’s already working to get charges dropped against many Columbia protestors — it’s far better to expend resources going after Trump.

And in many Soros-funded DAs’ cases, it’s far better to simply not prosecute violent or property crime at all.

Tragically, antisemitic bad guys know they get a pass from today’s extremist left. 

Eliot Ness was a law-and-order law enforcement agent. Bettmann Archive

Gone is the era of noble lawmen such as Eliot Ness, who pursued justice without fear or favor.

Progressive prosecutors at the federal and local level now conform their actions to prevailing woke orthodoxies.

This is doubly true when left-wing thugs are so violent, as we saw during the George Floyd riots and we have seen once again since Oct. 7.

Just as Hamas is still holding roughly 120 hostages in Gaza, so too have Hamas’s supporters held hostage America’s justice system

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large and host of “The Josh Hammer Show” and “America on Trial with Josh Hammer.” X: @josh_hammer.

Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/06/15/opinion/how-to-lock-up-those-nasty-pro-hamas-and-gaza-protestors/