First They Came For the Green Card Holders (and You Know the Rest)

If one of your goals is to traumatize a bookish 30-year-old female Ph.D. student (and Fulbright Scholar) there’s no better way to do so than surround her on a public street unexpectedly with masked plainclothes strangers, rip her phone out of her hand, strip off her backpack, handcuff her and throw her in the back of an unmarked S.U.V. that had been parked there waiting to pounce since 4:00 AM.  Snatching Ms. Rumeysa Ozturk off a Somerville street in such a heavy-handed manner appears to have been designed to send a message.

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Trump’s I.C.E. secret police was making an example of Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen who has been invited to the United States to participate in a program that embodies the best of scholarly cooperation among nations (and cooperation among nations isn’t high on MAGA’s list).

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Nabbed off the street shortly after the pinching of Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, (who is a Green Card holder) Ms. Ozturk’s abduction signaled the extent to which innocent visitors can be victimized simply for exercising their First Amendment rights (in her case, co-authoring an op-ed that called for an end to the genocide in Gaza).

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 (The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that First Amendment rights apply to everybody who resides in the United States regardless of immigration status.)

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Mr. Khalil’s capture was also gratuitously despotic: Plainclothes strangers appeared at the door of his Columbia University student apartment and jerked him away from his American wife (who was eight-months pregnant).  They refused to tell his wife where they were taking him or even to identify themselves.  They offered no explanation while dispatching Mr. Khalil first to New Jersey, then 2000 miles away to a Guantanamo in Louisiana.

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 All of which begs the question: Why use such theatrically flamboyant force?  What did these I.C.E. goons think was going to happen?  Did they believe the Tufts University Fulbright Scholar was going to “take a powder” and “go on the lam?”  Did they imagine that capturing Mr. Khalil or Ms. Ozturk might end in a shoot-out in a barn somewhere in rural Vermont?  W.T.F.?

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At the time of this writing they’ve also detained incommunicado an Iranian doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering from the University of Alabama, Alireza Doroudi, after the I.C.E. Stasi pounded on his door at 5:00 AM on March 27th.  The University of Alabama College Democrats responded with more courage than most of the Democrats in Washington, issuing a statement denouncing the deed:

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“Our fears have come to pass. Donald Trump, Tom Homan and ICE have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community. As far as we know right now, ICE is yet to provide any justification for their actions, so we are not sure if this persecution is politically motivated, as has been seen in other universities around the country.”

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These conspicuous, melodramatic federal actions are designed to strike fear in the hearts of every green card or student visa holder, which is exactly what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller and his gang want them to feel.  How long do you think it will be before they start coming after U.S. citizens who express political views they don’t like?  First they came for the green card holders, but I did not speak out, for I was not a green card holder . . .

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Thankfully, disappearing people with whom the government disagrees, where anonymous feds rough up and detain vulnerable people is currently being challenged in the courts.  But it’s not a good sign we’re seeing these Pinochet-type assaults on civil liberties at a time when anybody can be denounced as “supporting terrorism” just for calling for an end to the ghastly bloodshed in Gaza.

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Right-wing politicians and Israel-adjacent Likudniks in government and civil society have clearly embarked on a dangerous new political project.  Leading Democratic politicians have struck a Faustian bargain with the Far Right joining them in delegitimizing college student protesters and the progressive left generally through tarnishing them all as “anti-Semites” of “terrorist sympathizers.”

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Why would anyone oppose U.S. arms going to a beloved ally that daily massacres dozens of people, dropped 100,000 tons of bombs on a small strip of land where 2.3 million people live, and shut off their food, water, and medicine if it’s not because those who dispute these actions must be a bunch of Jew-hating bigots or “terrorists?”

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Today, we’re witnessing the bipartisan weaponization of the charge of “anti-Semitism” trained on those who want to see an end to the slaughter in Gaza.  By conflating “anti-Zionism” with “anti-Semitism,” and giving outsize attention to the college students who’ve called for an end to the barbarism, the political class is forgetting all about the real “wolf at the door” that arises from deeply-rooted racism in our society and has always emanated from the Far Right.

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One cannot expect the “America First” party that has within its ranks “Proud Boys” and “very fine people” who march around with Tiki-torches chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” to show much interest in monitoring right-wing anti-Semitism.  It’s shameful that the Anti-Defamation League is targeting people who don’t support Israel’s holocaust in Gaza as a loyalty oath to weed out “anti-Semites” while apologizing for powerful white supremacists who, like Dr. Strangelove, cannot contain their spontaneous “Roman salute” when they get excited.

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Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL know well the disturbing historical pedigree of right-wing anti-Semitism, yet they choose to focus on college students as the bigger threat.  College student protesters who have been taught since kindergarten to value racial justice and human rights, many of whom are Jewish.

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The “Big Lie” is that college students who protest against their government sending lethal military aid to a nation-state that is “plausibly” committing genocide  (according to the International Court of Justice) is somehow only motivated by anti-Jewish bigotry or love of “terrorism.”

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Neo-McCarthyism comes in all shapes and sizes.  It makes perfect sense that a bloviating Republican demagogue who became president whose lawyer used to be Roy Cohn would manage to bring on a new Red Scare.  In McCarthy’s day the smear of being a “communist” ruined careers, spread paranoia and betrayal, and was used as a cudgel to stifle dissent and silence the Left.

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McCarthy weaponized the charge of being a “communist” or a “fellow traveler” or a “pink” to score political points, win elections, and impede organized opposition.  Today, as in McCarthy’s time, the Democratic Party is playing along by joining in the accusations that anyone to the left of Chuck Schumer who criticizes U.S.-Israel policy must be an “anti-Semite” or a “terrorist.”

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It’s telling that at many of our nation’s top colleges and universities, when their students stood up in protest against racism and in favor of universal human rights, most administrators failed them miserably.  These students chose to act because for months they held in the palms of their hands distressing images from the unremitting massacre of Palestinians by America’s closest ally using American weaponry.

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The presidents of Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania were ousted even after kissing up to Republicans in Congress like Elise Stefanik.  They telegraphed to the world that the diktats of their Big Donors mattered far more than their own student bodies.

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At UCLA, the campus cops sat around playing tiddlywinks for hours while dozens of Maccabi-like hooligans threw rocks and bottles, smoke bombs, and Disney-sized fireworks into the Palestine solidarity encampment.  The UCLA administration didn’t lift a finger to keep their students safe even as the melee unfolded on local TV where masked nonstudent vigilantes brandished sticks and baseball bats and beat up nonviolent UCLA students.

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 During Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror the colleges and universities reacted similarly poorly, imposing “loyalty oaths” and firing faculty members or expelling students who might end up on McCarthy’s radar.  It’s important to note that McCarthyism was hugely successful for the GOP for over four years, from early-1950 to late-1954.

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Imagine the Trump Regime’s policies of deporting people whose only “crime” is exercising their First Amendment rights, or its “deconstructing” of the “administrative state” with mass unprecedented mass firings, or its weaponizing the Department of Justice and F.B.I. to go after political “enemies”; picture this aggressive authoritarian agenda walloping the Left nonstop all the way to 2029!  And with the help of the Democrats.

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The MAGA Republicans now hold complete power in Washington and this fact attests more to the failures of the Democratic Party to mount a viable opposition than to the popularity of GOP policies.  The Democratic Party leadership in McCarthy’s time fell in line behind his anti-communist witch hunt.

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In 2024, Kamala Harris ran a race without her party’s base because she made the political calculation that she couldn’t win without “the Lobby’s” imprimatur, and speaking out against the bloodbath in Gaza would be impolitic.  Good work!  She fucking lost anyway.

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Democratic House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are falling in line behind the bogus “anti-Semitism” narrative, which will only further alienate the party’s base.  (And midterm elections are base elections.). Jeffries is in the pocket of the Lobby and Schumer just published a whole book about how terrible young people are who want to stop Israel’s genocide because it’s all based on “anti-Semitism.”

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McCarthy eventually flamed out.  In December 1954, the Senate “censured” him in a vote of 67-22; a slap on the wrist after all the pain and suffering he caused and the lives and livelihoods he destroyed.  But it’s even harder today to imagine the Senate even taking this weak-tea symbolic step.

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“My job,” Schumer told the odious Bret Stephens in a recent interview, “is to keep the Left pro-Israel.”  Well, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate’s “job” just got a lot harder now.  I hope Chuck doesn’t really believe that clever messaging can win over people who’ve observed over the past eighteen months not only the destruction of Gaza and its people, but also the obliteration of international law and cherished American values.

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A vapid political hack like Schumer will never be able to understand the crisis in values our society now faces.  Schumer cannot see past his own hypocrisy; the betrayal of oft-stated principles is too obvious.  Do politicians like him believe that you can write the words “Finish Them!” on a bomb destined for a family in Gaza one day and then go out and talk about “health care” and “education” the next and people of conscience will vote for you?

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There’ve been too many murdered and maimed children, too many atrocities, too many war crimes, too much death and racial hatred, all proving that the logic of colonialism lives on and Arab lives don’t matter.  And everything the Democrats say from now on about “human rights” or “freedom” or “poverty” only spotlights their double-standards and duplicity, and digs the pit of their own illegitimacy even deeper.

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Zoomers, if you can find some spare change in the couch cushions, we could use it. We’re five months into a depressed traffic period due to the election going south on November 5. We are determined to stay in the game no matter what. Your support is deeply appreciated. Ursula

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