Accusations of “Anti-Semitism”—The New McCarthyism—a vicious weapon of the Trump fascist regime.

This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number 138.

As a veteran of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, I am particularly outraged—and every decent person should be outraged—about the fact that the current UC Administration has turned over 160 names of students, faculty and staff to the fascist Trump regime, in line with that regime’s false claims of “anti-Semitism” as an attack on free speech and academic freedom. This weapon of “anti-Semitism” is being used overwhelmingly not against people who are actually engaging in anti-Semitism (attacks on Jews for being Jewish, or on Jewish people as a people) but against those who are denouncing and protesting the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people by Israel, with the full backing of the U.S.

This is an attack on everything a university is supposed to stand for and be about—an attack with which this UC Administration is openly and willingly collaborating! This UC Administration is moving to turn a university famous for free speech into one infamous for suppressing free speech—into a model of McCarthyism (witch hunts in the 1950s, headed by Senator Joe McCarthy, which viciously persecuted people accused of being “communist enemies”). And, as terrible as the actions of the UC Administration are, this is not limited to UC Berkeley, it is happening on university campuses across the country. All in the service of the fascist Trump regime’s crusade against those it declares “enemies”—and in particular, its determination to turn universities into accomplices and instruments of the Trump fascist regime, perverting and suppressing intellectual inquiry and critical thinking.

It is not enough to say that this UC Administration should be ashamed. Students, faculty, staff—everyone who cares about academic freedom and free speech, who cares about basic rights—should rise up together in demanding that this UC Administration repudiate and reverse its cooperation with the Trump fascist regime. Again, it is not just UC Berkeley—and it is not just the Republican fascists. Even with their very real, and in many ways very acute, differences with the fascist Republicans, Democrats have too often joined in wielding false claims of “anti-Semitism,” to suppress speech and even the teaching of the true history of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the Zionist state of Israel, from the time of its founding, which has now reached terrible genocidal dimensions.

Everywhere, in universities and elsewhere, this false definition of “anti-Semitism,” and its use to suppress political speech and activity, must be thoroughly repudiated and actively opposed. In institutions of all kinds, throughout the country, people need to rise up in mass defiance and demand noncompliance of these institutions with the Trump fascist regime.

This needs to be done urgently—and it needs to be done as part of taking up and acting on the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org and open to all:

“The time has come for...THE FALL of the TRUMP FASCIST REGIME, Beginning November 5, 2025, Washington DC…Beginning November 5, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, flood DC in nonviolent protest. Surround the White House. Surround the Capitol. Surround the illegitimate fascist-packed Supreme Court. Come back again and again. Across the country, refuse to comply. Every person of conscience, millions of us together, grind the machinery of the fascist regime to a halt.

“Don’t stop until Trump is removed.”