It has been another exciting week here in the Land of Oz, formerly known as the United States of America, which is currently going through an apparently overdue purging that will replace the rule of law with a whimsical process whereby the Chief Executive is empowered to decide everything in a new nation that will likely be renamed Trumpland. The transition has not been pretty, as part of the process is to deport all undesirables. As a result, countries that have been reckoned to be friends to the American people and government including Britain and Germany are now warning their citizens that they might want to reconsider plans to travel to the US as they might be detained by one or more of America’s law enforcement authorities even if their travel status is fully legal and they have not committed anything that might be considered a crime in the real world. Germany this week said it was investigating the cases of three of its citizens being denied entry and placed in detention when they tried to enter through the US southern border and Britain similarly was looking into the rejection of a citizen also trying to enter by way of Mexico. That adds to the list of nations seeking to distance themselves from policies coming out of Washington and which are preparing themselves to strike back against punitive tariffs, sanctions and arbitrary detentions, to include “Fifty-first state” Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland.
The European Foreign Ministries are no doubt basing their advice in part on the case of a French scientist who was arbitrarily denied entry to the United States this month over messages reported to be critical of President Trump’s administration’s research policies. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education, shared how “he had learned with concern that a French academic who was going to a conference in Houston was denied entry before being deported” back to Europe. The academic, who was not named, was on assignment for France’s National Center for Scientific Research. Baptise explained “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because this researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy. Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law.”
And America’s universities, which are being particularly targeted as they are hotbeds of the only capital crime that really matters currently, anti-semitism, are rolling over to escape the wrath of Jehovah’s Anointed in Washington by expelling students and faculty and even stripping graduates of their degrees after the fact. Focal points for pro-Palestinian demonstrations like Columbia University in New York City and the University of California in Los Angeles are demonstrating their loyalty to the new order just as fast as they can, clearly recognizing that allowing someone to speak up against the genocide of the Palestinians is to identify ipso facto by White House think as a terrorist. Columbia is, for example, allowing Homeland Security agents to come on to campus and, without a warrant or any claim of criminal activity, interrogating and detaining students in dorms and classrooms. Interestingly, however, there is payback developing from the students. One report suggests that students accepted for the incoming Columbia freshman class in September are changing their minds and canceling their attendance in large numbers.
The most prominent victim of the Trump Administration’s witch hunt continues to be Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and a prominent organizer during last spring’s Gaza protests. He was arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in front of his pregnant wife, who pleaded with the agents to explain what the charges against him were. Khalil was a permanent resident with a current green card, but it was revoked by the federal government along with his student visa. The Trump administration moved to have Khalil immediately deported, but the effort was initially blocked by a federal judge in New York. No one knew where Khalil was for an extended period of time, but it was eventually learned that he was being held in a detention facility in Louisiana. At his first court hearing, one learned that his attorneys had not been able to communicate with him.
The Trump team immediately celebrated Khalil’s ordeal. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote the president in a Truth Social post. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act “Red scare” bit of legislation that authorized the government to target and remove “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Last week two more Columbia students were targeted for deportation. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release announced that Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman from the West Bank, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey by ICE agents for allegedly overstaying her F-1 student visa. She is currently being held at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Kordia reportedly participated in last spring’s Gaza protests at the university. Also, Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright Scholar at Columbia, fled the US over fears that she would be detained. She’s been in the United States for nearly ten years. “Having my visa revoked and then losing my student status has upended my life and future — not because of any wrongdoing, but because I exercised my right to free speech,” she explained to CNN in a statement.
A student at Cornell who challenged the Trump executive order calling for deportations is Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies. Taal filed the suit on March 15th hoping to prevent the administration from detaining or deporting him and others who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests but DHS has indicated that he will be detained. And there is also Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow in peace and conflict studies at Georgetown University, who was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents on his way home from teaching an evening class on March 17. Suri, an Indian citizen, is a fellow at the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an interfaith research center housed at Georgetown’s Washington DC campus. DHS agents later detained him near his home in Arlington, Virginia, and informed him that the US government had revoked his J-1 visa—a non-immigrant visa for foreign nationals participating in educational and cultural exchange programs. Suri was then transferred to an ICE detention facility in Virginia before he was transferred again to a facility in Louisiana, where he is currently being held. Since then, neither family nor lawyers have been allowed to speak with him.
There have been a number of other deportations from universities as well as denial of re-entry to the US if one has traveled outside the country. In a particularly bizarre case, the Department of Homeland Security admitted on March 17th that it had deported a Brown University professor and doctor with a valid visa because they said she attended a Hezbollah leader’s funeral in February during a trip to Lebanon. When questioned by Customs and Border Protection officers upon her return to the United States, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who is Lebanese, had been detained at Boston Logan International Airport on the previous Thursday. “A visa is a privilege not a right,” the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is common-sense security.”
Even agreeing with a viewpoint expressed on social media can get one in serious trouble with DHS. After Khalil’s arrest Columbia adjunct professor Stuart Karle called on students to refrain from posting about Palestine. “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he told them. When a Palestinian student objected to the idea of Columbia promoting censorship and bowing to the demands of the Trump administration, the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb, was even more direct. “Nobody can protect you,” Cobb told the student. “These are dangerous times.”
A curious aspect of the crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators is the presumption that the demonstrations are not only disruptive, which they are intended to be, and represent more than that, some kind of threat directed against both US foreign policy and American Jews. This has meant that violence perpetrated by pro-Israel groups in both New York City and Los Angeles to penetrate and attack the generally nonviolent student protester encampments has been treated like a non-issue. In New York peaceful demonstrators were infiltrated by former Israeli soldiers possibly led and funded by Israeli consulate officials, who infiltrated into groups of demonstrators and then released toxic “skunk bombs” which wound up sending many demonstrators to hospital. Skunk bombs are a “weapon” formulated in Israel which are generally used by Israeli army and police against protesting Arabs.
In Los Angeles a mob of hundreds violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, beating protesters without any intervention from the ranks of policemen nearby. The Israelis were identified in both cities and nothing appears to have been done to them apart from their being banned from campus, unlike what peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators have experienced at the hands of police and college administrations. Nor are groups of extremist Jews like Betar-USA that openly call for deporting and/or killing Palestinians under any kind of surveillance or threat of arrest. That is the power of the Israel Lobby at all levels in the United States – use violence to injure and suppress peaceful demonstrators protesting a genocide while the cause you support is carrying out that genocide with no objection from the US government at any level.
Perhaps the Trump administrations campaign to rid the United States of what it calls antisemites while also collaborating with the Israeli government’s desire to completely ethnically cleansing Palestinians should be examined through the lens of Israel’s power in the US due to the effective operation of that domestic lobby. Israel’s “friends” are everywhere. It was recently revealed that the woman behind the clampdown on pro-Palestine demonstrators at Columbia University is a former Israeli intelligence officer and it has long been known that the “censors” and “fact checkers” on many US social media sites are actually former Israeli intelligence officers from the notorious Unit 8200 secret cyber warfare snooper outfit. In the current revelation, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and an ex-official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. She is married to the head of that Mission. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed “wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus,” thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has sought to suppress the protests. This should surprise no one as it is exactly how Israel and its American allies operate across the board. Use “donations” to institutions and individual power brokers to pry open the door and then staff the targeted entities with your own people who will do your bidding. In any event, the United States is now paying the price for its love affair with Israel however it was contrived. Free speech and association are already flying out the open window and one can only wonder what will be coming next.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
