Glen Greenwald:
Just since last Friday night, 72 hours ago, several of America's most accomplished academic institutions – including Harvard, Columbia, and NYU – saw increasingly aggressive attempts to punish, fire and silence, not students, but academics and professors, for the crime of opposing Israel: all as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly celebrates his control over the discourse on American campuses.
We are – according to the Trump administration itself – only at the beginning, nowhere near the end, of the systemic assault on free thought in American academia: the place free thought is supposed to thrive most robustly. What's most amazing of all is that this free speech attack is not being waged in defense of Americans or American values, but instead in defense of a foreign country often cheered most by those who call themselves part of the America First movement, a staggering irony among many.
Deportations of students who denounced or protested the Israeli war in Gaza continue to gather steam. Another student at the University of Minnesota, in the country legally, was really disappeared by ICE agents yesterday. I use that verb, disappeared, quite deliberately – nobody knows where she is, including the university. Another student, earlier this last week, at Tufts, is now detained and imprisoned by ICE in Louisiana because she wrote an op-ed in her school paper advocating for university divestment of Israel until the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank ends. An op-ed.
The U.S. government is not grabbing these names out of a hat. They are being fed to them by two extremely sketchy and shadowy groups with deep ties to the Israeli State – the Canary Project and Betar. We'll tell you what we know about these groups and how they select people to go on their McCarthyite blacklist that is now allowing a foreign country to dictate the limits of free speech in the United States, including in academic institutions.
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