Zoha Khalili in the NYT on Kenneth Marcus's Resignation from the Dept. of Ed.

Palestine Legal opposed Kenneth Marcus’s anti-Palestinian agenda when he orchestrated complaints against student activism at his Brandeis Center, and we fought it when Trump nominated him to head civil rights at the Dept. of Education.

The New York Times reported this week that Marcus resigned after we filed a complaint to the Inspector General outlining the ways he violated the law in service of his anti-Palestinian agenda.

The article features staff attorney Zoha Khalili:

In another complaint filed in May with the department’s inspector general, nine civil rights groups said Mr. Marcus gave preferential treatment to a conservative Zionist group with close personal ties to him when he reopened a settled anti-Semitism case against Rutgers University.

The complaint to the inspector general requested an investigation into whether Mr. Marcus had broken the office’s protocol by personally overseeing the Rutgers complaint, saying he had violated his “obligation of impartiality.” In 2012, Mr. Marcus wrote an “open letter” to the president of Rutgers criticizing the university’s response to claims of anti-Semitism. The complaint included data that showed that as civil rights chief, Mr. Marcus bypassed more than 400 older appeals to embrace the Zionist Organization of America’s.

Zoha Khalili, a staff lawyer of Palestine Legal, one of the groups that filed the complaint, said the matter should still be investigated, though Mr. Marcus is leaving. The groups said his decision led to a “a growing influx” of “investigations targeting advocacy and scholarship on Palestinian rights.”

“We have a long road ahead to undo the damage that he and the rest of the administration have done,” she said.

Read the full article here.

Read our statement on Marcus’s resignation here.

Read more about Marcus's anti-civil rights agenda here.