JNS
The hearing was short on “concrete recommendations, given the exigency of the threat we have,” Kerry Sleeper, of Secure Community Network, told JNS.
Attendance of members of Congress was sparse at an urgent Wednesday hearing, which Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called on the “rise of anti-Israel extremist groups and their threat to U.S. national security,” with one of the witnesses telling JNS that he hoped for something more substantive.
“I thought they were productive discussions,” Kerry Sleeper, deputy director of intelligence and information sharing at Secure Community Network, the North American Jewish community’s official security organization, told JNS.
“I would have liked to have seen more concrete recommendations, given the exigency of the threat that we have and precisely what could be done to engage the federal government more effectively, integrating them with state and local and Jewish communal security groups,” Sleeper said.
Pfluger led the subcommittee hearing with Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.), the panel’s ranking member.
Sleeper testified that SCN has seen a significant increase in antisemitic threats from foreign terrorist organizations and media organizations linked to them, and those groups are using recent antisemitic attacks to foment even more violence.
Those threats “will likely persist for several years,” he told the committee.
At the start of the hearing, Pfluger noted the recent murder of two Israeli embassy staffers nearby, outside the Capital Jewish Museum, and recent attacks on pro-Israel marchers in Boulder, Colo.
Antisemitic groups like Within Our Lifetime, Unity of Fields and Students for Justice in Palestine, all based and active in the United States, are “amplifying messaging consistent with foreign terrorist organizations and Iranian-backed information operations,” while helping to “blur the line between protest and incitement,” he told the subcommittee.
That includes 6,000 violent threats targeting the Jewish community that SCN analysts detected just in the week following the May 21 murders of the embassy staffers in Washington, he said.
Sleeper urged the Trump administration to lay the foundation for a national strategy incorporating security, intelligence and information sharing, in partnership with law enforcement and established Jewish communal security.
The strategy would be “managed by a task force with the specific focus of identifying and clarifying the threat regardless of its origin,” Sleeper said. The task force would handle “coordinating strike teams across the country to arrest individuals threatening the Jewish community with acts of targeted violence.”
Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, warned the subcommittee that online platforms are allowing foreign terror groups to encourage importing the Israel-Hamas conflict by calling on activists to “bring the war home” by sharing propaganda.
Segal encouraged legislators to increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, though subcommittee members noted that the Trump administration has not freed up significant sums of money already appropriated under the program.
The ADL official also said that laws already on the books penalizing support for terror groups ought to be applied to online platforms. “The time to act is now,” Segal said.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), co-chair of the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, told JNS that some good recommendations came up at the hearing, including fully funding the grant program.
The congressman said the program was appropriated $305 million for the coming fiscal year, drawing the ire of Jewish groups wanting more. That figure is a return to fiscal year 2023, before the rise of Jew-hatred post-Oct. 7.
Goldman supports more funding for the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office to ensure adequate resources for investigating cases of campus Jew-hatred, and for the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, also known as CP3, which aims to prevent terrorism and targeted violence, including by working with communities and providing resources.
“There’s a real concern that antisemitism is being used as a partisan weapon and as a pretext for other policy issues, whether that be immigration as it relates to the Boulder attack, or whether it be against universities more broadly, such as what’s going on at Harvard,” Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.) told JNS.
Pou appeared to take an “all groups matter” approach, telling JNS after the hearing that “we want to make sure that there are guidelines, that we put in place safeguards to protect all people in our country, and certainly the Jewish community, who currently has been under attack.”
She said she is stressing the importance of the Trump administration releasing the grant program funds “for security and the protection of all communities, which helps mosques. It helps synagogues. It helps community schools. It helps churches. It helps all communities to maintain safety.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) joined the meeting for only a few minutes, decrying what she said were ties between anti-Israel threats and illegal immigration, pointing to the Boulder assailant’s expired visa.
Goldman immediately castigated Greene, telling attendees that “it’s a little rich to be lectured about antisemitism from somebody who could not even bring herself to vote ‘yes’ on an antisemitism resolution that was supported by all but two members of the House of Representatives.”
Greene and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) voted “present” on a Monday resolution, which passed the House 400-0. Greene explained at the time that she felt the bill put too much focus on threats and crimes against Jews, omitting other groups.
Part of Wednesday’s hearing focused on the line between free speech and criminal activity. Segal said many individual anti-Israel acts fall under First Amendment protections, but they collectively bring things to a “slow boil” that leads to violence.
Julie Fishman Rayman, senior vice president of policy and political affairs at the American Jewish Committee, was asked at the hearing about how she interprets “free Palestine.” (The gunman who allegedly killed the two Israeli embassy staffers, as they left an AJC event, reportedly shouted the line repeatedly.)
“There are a great many interpretations of what those types of messages mean,” Rayman said, noting that the same can be said of “from the river to the sea.”
“For many who would say that, they’re saying that ignorantly as synonymous for a free Palestine,” she said. “But if you look at where the river is and where the sea is, and if, in fact, what they mean when they say that is that it is only for Palestinians and not for Jews, that’s a very different message.”
Goldman told JNS that “even if you are free to support or use racial slurs or other bigoted comments, and those rights are protected, we need to condemn them and make it clear that it is not acceptable to express those viewpoints.”
“It should not be acceptable to have those viewpoints,” he said.
