“Pre-Baked Frame-up Operation”: allegations of antisemitism politicization in campus crackdown

Attempts to shield Israel against campus criticism took two blows this summer with a whistleblower and leading opposition politician questioning a government taskforce formed early in Donald Trump’s second term to combat campus antisemitism. Whistleblower Haley Van Erem, who resigned in 2025 after nearly a decade working with the United States Department of Justice’s civil rights division, accused the government of “politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law” in its taskforce formed purportedly to combat anti-Semitism at universities. In addition Jamie Raskin, the leading Democratic Party member on the House Judiciary Committee, has claimed that the United States’ top legal ministry politicized and contrived accusations of anti-Semitism at universities.

Leo Terrell led the taskforce accused of spurious accusations of antisemitism to pressure universities and their Muslim staff.

Terrorized by Terrell?

The taskforce, headed by lawyer Leo Terrell, was set up by Trump in the winter of 2025 as part of a Republican campaign to root out alleged antisemitism on campuses. As MuslimMatters among other outlets documented, reckless accusations of antisemitism had been used since the late days of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joseph Biden (2021-25) to justify major crackdowns, including violence against peaceful protesters, on American campuses in 2023-24 with the tacit or overt approval of university administrators. The fact that their victims included Jews critical of Israel cut little ice with these supposed champions against antisemitism. However, even this alarmingly callous disregard for student well-being or indeed for basic facts of the case was insufficient for bipartisan Zionist politicians, whose Republican wing launched a major attack to browbeat university administrators into further concessions.

When the Republicans came to power, Trump lost no time in bowing to this pressure and signing off on an inter-departmental taskforce against antisemitism: this targeted three top “Ivy League” universities: Brown, Columbia, and Harvard.

Whose Cancel Culture?

The campaign fitted easily with longstanding rightwing complaints about alleged university indoctrination, a complaint whose latest iteration frequently attacks “wokism” on campuses. This “wokism”, often synonymized with left-wing politics, internationalism, or concern about social injustices, has long been blamed by many rightwing activists for challenging their preferred weltenschaung and supposedly “cancelling” conservative or rightwing figures from universities.

Ironically, however, the taskforce’s driving force also borrowed from the tradition of Campus Watch, a Zionist pressure group influential in hounding out pro-Palestinian, and generally independently minded Muslim, academics and students off campuses. Founded a generation ago, early in the “War on Terror”, by the Islamophobic provocateur Daniel Pipes, a professor of questionable integrity, Campus Watch was an academic forerunner among a number of Zionist pressure groups that have abounded since in other facets of society, such as media, social groups, and business. Such pressure groups as the Anti-Defamation League and Canary Project have repeatedly launched campaigns to silence, sideline, sack, and otherwise purge from polite society any figure who spoke up for Palestine in particular and in favour of Muslim causes or Islamic principles more generally.

These sorts of networks were instrumental in whipping hysteria about alleged antisemitism when protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestine began in 2023-24. They influenced both Democratic politicians, as seen during the crackdowns during Biden’s last year of office, and their Republican counterparts. This occurred even as younger Americans in both parties and beyond have become more critical of Israel during its genocide, with Israel and Zionist thinktanks also widely seen as instigating a dead-end war with Iran in 2026.

Leading Democrat Jamie Raskin has questioned the taskforce’s integrity.

“Raskin” Careers

Van Eren resigned in May 2025, a few months after Terrell’s taskforce was founded. In a complaint disclosed to the Associated Press, her lawyers have alleged that the taskforce predetermined the results of its investigation without evidence for political purposes. This “politically mandated effort” is alleged to have been a method to extract funds and concessions from pressured universities.

Raskin, meanwhile, wrote to Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney-General for Civil Rights to whom taskforce chief Terrell also served as Senior Counsel. After yielding a need to combat antisemitism, he added: “your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”

Though it may come as little surprise to much of the American Muslim community and indeed many non-Muslims familiar with the cases, Van Erem’s complaint is also noteworthy in its square allegation that government “officials targeted some Middle East Studies faculty for the content of their work and other professors for their Muslim faith.”

This “whole project,” Raskin charged in his letter to Dhillon, “was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”