Key points
- Academics argue US Govt systematically targeted students based on their remarks about Israel
- Testimony helped build the case by the academic groups behind the lawsuit
- State Department did not conduct its reviews based on a common understanding of what qualified as “antisemitism”: John Armstrong
ISLAMABAD: A senior State Department official has testified that his office, which the Trump administration has tasked with vetting foreign students’ social media posts and revoking student visas, has operated this year without a working definition of “antisemitism” and routinely considers criticism of Israel as part of its work, according to The New York Times.
The newspaper reported that the testimony, at the end of a two-week trial focused on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport students such as Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and others, helped build the case by the academic groups behind the lawsuit, who have argued that the government systematically targeted students based on their remarks about Israel.
“Antisemitism”
During a heated back-and-forth in Federal District Court in Boston, John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, said that the State Department regularly took into account speech or actions that it saw as hostile toward Israel.
The New York Times reported that Armstrong said the State Department did not conduct its reviews based on a common understanding of what qualified as “antisemitism.”
“Concrete piece of guidance”
“I cannot remember a concrete piece of guidance,” he said. “It seems to me, there may have been some, but I do not remember a concrete cable where I can say, ‘This cable defines antisemitism.’”
But Armstrong’s description of his agency’s work helped to support, at least in part, assertions made by the American Association of University Professors, which brought the lawsuit, according to The New York Times.
The association has argued that individual arrests of students like Khalil, Ozturk and others were part of a larger policy.
