Doj Indicts Eight Anti-zionist Activists Over Alleged University Of Michigan Intimidation Campaign

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday indicted eight anti-Zionist activists for allegedly carrying out a campaign of vandalism, stalking, and intimidation targeting University of Michigan officials, local businesses, and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

The indictment, unsealed in federal court in Detroit, describes an alleged campaign that included attacks on homes, efforts to intimidate witnesses, discussions of plots to murder university officials and their families, and violent fantasies involving “poison, bombs, and psychological torture.”

The defendants include individuals with varying levels of affiliation with the University of Michigan. If convicted, they could face decades in prison.

“No one has the right to threaten, intimidate, and coerce public officials, law enforcement officers, community institutions, or their families,” said Jennifer Runyan, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office. “In the dead of night, masked and hooded defendants allegedly threw noxious chemicals through the windows of families’ homes and taped demand letters to their front doors.”

“At every step, they attempted to cover their tracks and delete evidence of their crimes,” she added.

The charges mark a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on unlawful anti-Zionist activity following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre across southern Israel, after which Jewish students on US college campuses reported a surge of antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and violence.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly described anti-Israel campus protesters as antisemitic and accused some of promoting anti-American propaganda. After returning to office in January, he issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “all appropriate legal tools” to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold accountable those responsible for unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.

The order built on Trump’s first-term Executive Order 13899, which directed federal agencies to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism when enforcing civil rights law in cases involving discrimination against Jews.

Critics of the administration’s approach have raised concerns about civil liberties and free speech. But the indictment announced Wednesday involves alleged criminal conduct, not protected political expression, including vandalism, threats, stalking, and attempts to intimidate witnesses.

For several years before and since Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and other acts of discrimination. These included anti-Zionists spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism.

Other incidents include a faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic political cartoon which marked Jews and Israel as enemies of people of color; a Cornell University student threatening to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall; and professors praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which included mass murder, sexual assault, and kidnapping as legitimate modes of “resistance.”

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said the nation’s highest law enforcement agency  will no longer tolerate that style of protest.

“In America, we rule by law not by fear,” US attorney general Jerome Gorgon said. “These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American. We will counter intimidation with justice.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.