🎓 Northwestern University Blocks 300 Students From Class Who Refuse to Take Outrageous Zionist Training

A mandatory video equates critiquing Israel with bigotry, falsely calls the West Bank “Judea & Samaria,” and links critics of Israel to KKK Members

Sep 28, 2025

✊🏽 Family — before we begin

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What happened

Northwestern University has just placed registration holds on at least 300 students who refused a mandatory “antisemitism” training video. Students — including many Jewish dissenters — say the film is inaccurate, politicized, and inflames campus tensions over Gaza instead of making anyone safer.

This isn’t theoretical. A registration hold can jeopardize visas, stipends, jobs, and health insurance. That’s not “education.” That’s coercion. And I am absolutely sure this is the goal.

Credit where it’s due

The Guardian’s reporting by Tom Perkins (Sept 27, 2025) laid out the facts. The very next day, CAIR-Chicago called the requirement what it is: “state-sponsored thought enforcement.” Executive Director Ahmed Rehab put it plainly:

“Students are pressured by a university to sign onto beliefs they do not freely hold or risk being denied an education… A university should not be pressured to indoctrinate its students with propaganda for a foreign state or risk losing access to government funding.”

Northwestern says the module is akin to other discrimination/harassment trainings and only asks students to attest to the code of conduct. But the content itself isn’t neutral. It’s a political script.

The receipts (and why they matter)

The video equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, even comparing critics to David Duke, and leans on a controversial definition of antisemitism (Guardian).
It claims Israel was founded “on British land” and rebrands the occupied West Bank as “Judea & Samaria.”
The film is produced by JUF, a pro-Israel advocacy group; Northwestern says it’s required.
The university cited Trump’s Jan 29 Executive Order to justify rollout; $790M in research funding was still cutanyway (Guardian).
Jewish students opposing the module wrote that it “reinforces, rather than reduces,” discriminatory bias on campus.

(Credit: The Guardian, Tom Perkins. CAIR-Chicago statement, Sept 28, 2025.)

Compelled ideology is not safety

You cannot make campuses safer by turning scholarship into a loyalty oath. You cannot protect Jewish students by collapsing a state into a people — that conflation endangers Jews and Palestinians alike and leaves everyone less safe. And you do not teach history by declaring a contested political narrative to be an unquestionable truth, then tying enrollment — and immigration status — to consent.

I’ve seen real antisemitism. I’ve seen real Islamophobia. Anything that blurs those lines to police political dissent makes it harder to confront either.

What real safety training should look like

If your goal is safety, start there. Define antisemitism precisely, separately from critique of state policy. Put anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias on equal footing. Remove biblical or nationalist claims from required modules. Submit scripts to independent academic review. Provide opt-out alternatives for students with conscience objections. Investigate harassment neutrally, and keep enrollment out of it.

If the objective is education, there is a way. If the objective is consent, call it what it is.

This is bigger than one campus

This is what happens when the federal government waves a cudgel and universities try to appease it with compelled speech. It doesn’t heal bias. It doesn’t earn back funding. It trains people to perform agreement. Today it’s a video about Israel/Palestine. Tomorrow it’s a demanded script about something else. The precedent is the point.

Northwestern can still do the right thing: lift the holds, withdraw this ridiculous film, and convene Jewish, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied scholars and students to build a fact-checked, bias-balanced training that protects people without policing thought.

What I’m asking of you, right now

If you believe universities shouldn’t coerce belief — if you believe safety and conscience can both be honored — help keep this coverage public. We’re at 2,891 members with 109 to go to 3,000 (that’s 37 per day). When we cross 3,000, we run at 5,000 by Dec 31 to fund deeper reporting and keep this platform free and unerasable. Become a member today — and if you can’t join, forward this to three people who care about academic freedom and real safety.