“Radical,” “foreign,” “pro-Hamas,” “pro-terrorist,” “anti-Semitic,” “anti-American” — these are all words President Donald Trump has used to describe Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University. Because he led student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, the Trump administration is now trying to deport him for his activism. According to his narrative, he is one of the many subversive, foreign-aligned radicals — many of them “paid agitators,” to use his language — working to overrun American college campuses and to undermine our national security; they must be deported if they are foreign or punished if they are domestic. Sound familiar?
Trump’s rhetoric against pro-Palestinian students — and universities in general — draws dangerous parallels to the McCarthy era of United States history, where political persecution against supposed “communist sympathizers” sent hundreds to jail and caused over ten thousand more to lose their jobs. Today, this persecution is revived in the campaigns of mass doxxing, deportation and harassment facing students who protest for Palestine, and in the revocations of federal funding from top universities that refuse to align with the Trump administration’s demands. Just as they did in the McCarthy era, such measures aim to intimidate activist faculty and students who speak out against political injustice, thereby quelling dissent against the United States government and its allies.
Take the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student seized off the street on March 25 by plainclothes United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, whose case is currently being heard in Vermont. The only justification given for her arrest by the Department of Homeland Security was that she had been “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” with no further elaboration. Yet, prior to her disappearance, she had not been closely involved in any pro-Palestinian protests at Tufts; in fact the only form of activism she had been engaged in beforehand was the publication of an op-ed — eerily similar to what I myself have written before in this paper — calling for Tuft’s divestment from Israel in light of its “deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter” of Palestinians.
Under the new McCarthyism, simply expressing the opinion that “plausible genocide” is a “credible accusation” against Israel, to quote Ozturk and her co-authors, is an activity in support of Hamas. This is a blatantly misrepresentative and personal attack on Ozturk’s character that is disturbingly reminiscent of those made during the Second Red Scare.
My point here isn’t to argue that there is a one-to-one correlation between McCarthyism and this new brand of Trumpism, because there isn’t: McCarthy targeted universities by harassing individual professors for being alleged “commies,” and didn’t bother going after entire departments, and even institutions, as Trump has done. My point here is that we are repeating our own history in dangerous ways, and not enough people are speaking out about it.
Make no mistake: our own civil liberties, as US citizens, are at risk – in fact, under constitutional law, the protections for non-citizen residents of the United States are almost exactly the same as those for citizens. If today Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and hundreds of others can have their freedom revoked for speaking out against injustice, then tomorrow it can be you and I.
We at Dartmouth are already feeling the repercussions of Trump’s attacks on higher education: two of our own have had their visa statuses attempted to be revoked without reason from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, our peer universities are being forced to choose between losing billions of dollars of federal funding or giving into various ultimatums: among them, putting their academic departments under external receivership, ending programs such as DEI that serve vulnerable students and cracking down further on student protest.
We, as students committed to a free and open society, need to draw a red line. If today we do not stand for the rights of pro-Palestinian, international, and undocumented students on our campus, we will find ourselves facing the same treatment tomorrow. The words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the Holocaust, express this sentiment better than I ever could:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Now they are coming for international students, and now is the time to protest more intensely than we ever have before at Dartmouth – and we have a long history of activism to build off of. I urge all my fellow students: speak out, speak loud and, to quote President Eisenhower’s 1953 commencement speech at Dartmouth, “don’t join the bookburners.”
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
