‘Little Gaza’: US Sen. Tom Cotton introduces legislation to combat campus radicalism

The WEST Act would institute a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of seditious, pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them, advancing the Republican Party’s offensive against the pro-Hamas student movement.

Shared first with Breitbart News, a news outlet that was instrumental in launching US President Donald Trump’s populist movement, the “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” and “Woke Endowment Security Tax (WEST)” come amid a series of riotous demonstrations promoting antisemitic ideas, as well as the goals of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and a widespread perception that elite universities have not done enough to combat them.

“First, any pro-Hamas protester convicted of a crime should be ineligible for federal student loans, and federal student loan relief. The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton said in a social media post on Tuesday announcing his introduction of the bills. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”

He continued, “The WEST Act would tax the largest university endowments to help pay down national debt and secure our southern border.”

As Cotton mentioned in his social media posts, the No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief.

Meanwhile, the WEST Act would institute a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.

Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.

In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report, that said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas that constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future.

Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers.

It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.

The new Trump administration has taken steps to convert this vision into policy since assuming power in January.

On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions.

Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”

A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses.

That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.

On Monday, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that dozens of colleges and universities will be investigated for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism.

McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.