During his recent appearance on Sputnik’s Critical Hour podcast, Dr. Horne noted that one of the US lawmakers who authored this particular draft bill, Rep. Richie Torres, is a “favorite of the neoconservative columnists” at NYT while the other, Rep. Mike Lawler, is “trawling for campaign donations from Zionists and Israeli billionaires” ahead of the reelection bid he may end up losing this November.
“It is also a capitulation to a double standard, as one would not know from looking at this particular piece of legislation that black students in particular have been complaining for years about harassment on campus,” the scholar added. “But what our students were told is that they need to buck up, stiffen their spines, ‘don’t be a snowflake’ and proceed on. Whereas these pro-Zionist students, there's even been calls for the National Guard to be entering campuses, supposedly to protect them.”
Dr. Horne pointed out that such a deployment may not be a good idea, referring to the Kent State shooting of 1970 when several students were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen amid protests against the US involvement in the Vietnam War.
He also observed that the movement to promote a ceasefire in the Gaza War is “spreading” to other parts of the globe. “It's spread to Paris, where you have demonstrations and encampments at the Sorbonne,” Dr. Horne said. “And of course, we will stand firm until the students overcome.”
Last month, US House Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) moved to propose a bill that would empower the US Department of Education to deploy a "third-party anti-Semitism monitor" to US colleges that receive federal funding in order to gauge "the progress that a college or university has made toward combating anti-Semitism."
The legislation was allegedly drafted due to concerns voiced by “countless Jewish students from campuses across America” who claimed that they “feel deeply unsafe, purely as a result of their religious and ethnic identity," according to Rep. Torres.
This development came amid a wave of student protests against the Gaza War that erupted on campuses all across the United States in recent weeks.