JNS
Jason Miyares told JNS that his message to campus police chiefs in Virginia is that “we have your back.”
When pro-Hamas protests and ideology exploded on university campuses across the country after Oct. 7, Jason Miyares, the Virginia attorney general, brought police chiefs from all of the commonwealth’s campuses to the capital in Richmond for a meeting and a briefing.
“A lot of them, at a time, felt at some of the campuses that the administration didn’t have their back,” Miyares told JNS. “My message was that ‘we have your back.’”
Miyares, a Republican running for re-election this year, addressed the Christians United for Israel summit in the Washington, D.C., area on Tuesday. The state attorney general was part of a wide-ranging legal discussion about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and in education, the adoption and implementation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred and his office training law enforcement in the state on handling antisemitism.
He told JNS that the talks he had with campus police chiefs largely revolved around explaining First Amendment jurisprudence to them, including what types of speech and actions the Constitution protects and which cross the line to prohibited conduct.
Miyares wants law enforcement in Virginia to understand the basics of Jew-hatred. As part of the curriculum for Virginia State Police cadets, the academy now requires a segment on antisemitism and a visit to the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond.
“So many of our cadets come from really rural areas that are just not familiar with this issue, so we thought that was important,” Miyares told JNS. “As I often say, the best way to fight bad information is with good information.”
“We want these officers, both our campus and state police officers, to have the right information and also have a historical context, particularly those going through our academies, of the history of antisemitism,” he said.
Miyares told JNS that schools in the state have welcomed Jews more than some in other states due to the tone that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has set.
“Gov. Youngkin took the attitude that what happened at Columbia University will not happen on a Virginia campus,” Miyares told JNS. “There’s a reason why it has not happened here. I think it’s because of strong leadership really coming from the top.”
During the summer break, Miyares told JNS that his office maintains an “active discussion” with police chiefs on the state’s campuses, as well as with school board members and advisory councils.
They discuss “expectations of what a safe environment is to learn and what is also unacceptable behavior towards and violations of our Jewish students’ civil rights while they’re on campus,” he said.
Miyares told JNS that he has watched the events unfolding across U.S. campuses and thinks that those participating in anti-Israel protests are “failing a moral test.”
A month after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli government invited Miyares, the Argentine attorney general and the chief counterterrorism prosecutors from France, Austria and Germany to visit the Jewish state. Each represented a country whose citizens Hamas held. (Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a dual Israeli-American who grew up in Richmond, Va., was taken hostage and later murdered in Gaza.)
The group visited the hard-hit Kibbutz Beeri, where Miyares saw a particularly disturbing sight. “I walked into a little girl’s room that had her doll strewn on the floor,” he told JNS. “I assume she had been trying to hide, and in the corner were bullet holes and blood. They had executed this girl.”
“I had three daughters, so this was very powerful for me,” he said.
He was even more shocked when he returned to the United States. “Not even 24 hours after standing in the room of this young Jewish child that had been executed and murdered in cold blood, I’m standing at JFK Airport, and I look up at the TV screen and I see American college students waving the Hamas flag and chanting Hamas slogans,” he told JNS.
“I thought, this is the moral test of our time, and our colleges and so many people in our society are failing this,” he said. “It just gave me a resolve not to be quiet.”
Being silent fails the moral test, according to Miyares.
“It requires us to speak out, and that really has filled me with an unshakable resolve to be on the right side of history, standing with the Jewish people,” he said.
More than 10 years ago, Miyares visited Israel. On a tour of the Gaza border community of Sderot, which is regularly targeted by rocket fire, he noticed a playground with bomb shelters—an “unnatural” sight, he said.
“A mom came up to me,” he told JNS. “She realized we were Americans, and she stopped by and wanted to thank us for the United States’s support for Israel.”
The mother noted that when a red alert goes off on her phone, indicating incoming rocket fire, “she has a 5- and a 3-year-old, and she has about 30 seconds to get to a bomb shelter,” he told JNS. “She said, ‘I only have time to take one. They’re both in a car seat. Which one do I take? Which one do I leave behind?’”
That Sophie’s Choice-like decision “really struck me that the challenges here are unlike anything that we could ever have a conception of in the United States,” Miyares told JNS.
Determined to do his part to weed out support for terror, the attorney general’s office is still locked in a long-running legal battle with Virginia-based American Muslims for Palestine over the latter’s alleged support for terror organizations.
This May, Miyares won a court decision compelling the group to comply with a subpoena for documents in his office’s investigation into the group, which may shed more light on its finances.
Miyares said he is not able to discuss aspects of the ongoing investigation. JNS asked if his office is looking at any other nonprofits that allegedly support terror.
“There are others that have popped on our radar, but we are not ready to make any statement on any other potential reviews of charitable organizations that are in violation of our laws,” he said.
