You are living in America and you have never learned the concepts of gradients, relativism, degrees, proportionality and bring up your absolutism in your typical Biblical phrases of BS! No, the crackdown even if officially condoned, which it was NOT, not happened under the Genocide Joe and Netanyahu was furious at that.
Ask the students themselves what they had then and what they are facing now. It was mostly the rich Jewish
donors to the university who muzzled the univ admins and the pro Israel Congressmen dragging Univ Presidents to 'hearings'.
Your gross exaggerations border lying!
Americans are rightly alarmed. Brown, immigrants: Better behave because Netanyahu's man in the White House will try to cleanse America of pro Palestinian voices! They are the first target but under the umbrella of such precedents, many more will be targeted.
Don’t Fool Yourself Into Thinking It Will Stop With Columbia
Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.
The story of Columbia isn’t simply about Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student in international affairs there who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that burst into view almost immediately after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. But when federal immigration officials showed up at his apartment building last weekend and
whisked him away to a facility in Louisiana to begin deportation proceedings, they brought the malice and incompetence of the Trump administration into stark relief.
The incompetence was obvious from the start. At the time of Khalil’s arrest, federal officers seem to have
believed that he was in the United States on a student visa. But that was incorrect. He’s a green-card holder, a lawful permanent resident of the United States.
The malice was plain as well. In spite of his permanent residency, which agents on the scene appear to have learned about soon enough, the government did not permit Khalil to have a privileged conversation with his lawyer until it was
ordered to do so by a federal judge. Khalil was taken from his family when his wife, who is
an American citizen, was eight months pregnant.
What was the reason for his arrest, potential deportation and isolation from his own attorneys? According to the Department of Homeland Security’s
Notice to Appear that was provided to Khalil, “The secretary of state has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
While that statement sounds damning, the reality is that Khalil was detained because of his protest activity and not because he’d provided illegal support for terrorists. As an administration official told
The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.”
In an interview with NPR, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,
made it clear that the administration was targeting Khalil’s expression. “We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country,” Edgar said, “and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the secretary of state can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.”
But there is no visa to review. Khalil is a permanent resident now. Make no mistake, the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil are a direct attack on free speech.
While I’m appalled by the administration’s actions, I’m not surprised that the case arose out of what someone was doing at Columbia. The university has been in various degrees of political turmoil for decades.
In fact, the first time I had to walk through metal detectors to give a speech was at Columbia 20 years ago. I was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (now called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and I went to campus to
defend the right of Jewish students to speak out against faculty antisemitism in the university’s Middle East and Asian languages and culture department.
I will never forget the menacing atmosphere both on campus and at the event itself. People in the audience shouted at me and shouted at one another. Protesters chanted in the halls.
