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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.
I try hard to avoid hyperbole in my journalism, my reporting, my analysis, or my commentary. I think it just is very discrediting. It's also a kind of softball just to leap to the most dramatic rhetoric possible the minute you want to make a point about something. Therefore, I say this with all due deliberation, with all consideration, I really do believe the United States is currently engaged in confronting one of the worst free speech crises we've confronted in many years. And I say that as somebody who is extremely vocal and relentless in denouncing the Biden administration's various ways to censor political speech from coercing Big Tech platforms to remove dissent, to imposing all kinds of orthodoxies, to endorsing and financing a disinformation industry deciding to censure. What we're having now is a full-frontal attack on the core rights of free speech, free discourse and academic freedom. That is an incredibly important American value: academic freedom.
Our country was built on the principles of the Enlightenment. One of the things that Enlightenment thinkers most stood for was the idea that in society generally, but especially in academic institutions, you'd need to have full freedom to question and prod at, and dissect, and deny, and call into question the most cherished orthodoxies. It was crucial to have at least one place in society that was not just tolerant of but encouraging of the most sacred and valued priorities to be questioned and denied. That's what academia is for. That's what academic freedom is about. And all of that is being very rapidly subverted by a Trump administration that came in promising to end censorship and restore the values of free speech in the United States.
They're doing so for the very obvious reason that they want to prevent American academia and American college campuses, but people in general, from feeling free to criticize the state of Israel or question the U.S. financing of Israel and the relationship with Israel, where we give them billions of dollars and arm them. They want to create a climate where people are afraid of what the consequences will be if they speak negatively or critically about Israel and it's already having major repercussions.
Sometimes the Trump administration and officials are directly punishing people or demanding censorship. Other times the threat that they have hovering over them is causing self-censorship, which often is one of the most pernicious forms of censorship – people and institutions start anticipating what the punishment might be if they exercise free speech so they voluntarily renounce it to keep the government pleased and happy and at bay.
Here is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Trump's former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who just yesterday appeared in public to openly boast about it and celebrate the fact that the Trump administration is supposedly waging a war against bigotry on campuses – just like the liberal left said they were doing – and is curbing speech in the name of stopping hate speech and racism, just like the liberal left was doing. But at least the American liberal left was doing so in the name of protecting people in the country, protecting Americans, protecting America, that was their ostensible goal. This now is a censorship regime really being engineered by a foreign government and its loyalists inside the United States. And they're more than happy to tell you that:
Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, David Friedman, GPO. March 30, 2025.
So, remember the conservative critique of the censorship regime that came from on college campuses? Liberals would constantly depict whatever speech they disliked as inciting violence against minorities, being racist, transphobic, xenophobic, whatever, and then would say, “No, this isn't speech. This is violence, this is incitement, this is bigotry” and not only would they do that, but a lot of the censorship, including banning President Trump from Facebook and Twitter while he was still in office, were based on the argument that, “No, this isn't speech that he is uttering and spreading, it's incitement to insurrection.” And there's a big difference, they said, between speech and hate speech, or free speech and bigotry, or free speech and incitement. These are all the arguments now being marshaled, not by our leaders, but by a leader of a foreign country who's proudly patting us on the head for engaging in the kind of censorship that he loves and telling other countries they better do the same. Why does this little country that we finance, and it depends on the American taxpayer, have any say in what people can say at college campuses and how we can protest?
It's so ironic because a lot of conservatives or Trump supporters justify the deportation of students from college campuses by saying, “Well, they're just foreigners, they're guests in our country. Foreigners have no right to comment on our policies, to denounce anything, to protest against anything.” It’s a strange principle, the idea that you lure foreign students to your universities because that's how you get a lot of brain drain into your country – which both Elon Musk and Trump said was necessary when they defended H-1B visas increasing – and then tell them you can stay for eight years and get degrees, you just have to keep your mouth shut about anything political.
But here you have Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only did he say this, but last week he mocked, denounced and attacked the American judiciary and the American legal system because he's facing a corruption case and wants Americans to think that the persecution of Donald Trump was similar to his persecution, but then also the president of El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, went on to Twitter and just mocked a court order that came from our judiciary saying, “Whoopsie ” – mocked our court system, mocked our legal system. and a lot of people keep saying foreigners have no right to comment on our politics. “We're all, oh, thank you. Thank you, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Thank you, President Bukele, for standing up to the American judiciary.”
There are all those Israelis applauding. The Trump administration is going to go to war against not anti-Black racism, not misogyny, not transphobia, not xenophobia, not Islamophobia. Who cares about any of those types of bigotries? We're going to let those reign free, because any attempt to stop those on campus, that's censorship, that's woke ideology. David Friedman tells everybody the government is going to do a lot to fight bigotry in the United States – is that the government's role now? – including putting people in prison for saying anything antisemitic – not even antisemitic, but antisemitic in their view. They think that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
These people think that antisemitism doesn't mean denying the Holocaust or talking about the inherent degeneracy of Jews like classic antisemitism, they've expanded radically the definition of that term. In fact, the Trump administration is imposing on various administrations and colleges the requirement that they expand what antisemitism means to include a whole range of common credits of Israel. We showed you that many times. The House actually passed a law to implement and formalize that expanded definition of antisemitism, which actually is implemented in the EU, because they have a lot of hate speech codes that JD Vance went to Europe and said this is antithetical to our values – but that censor in the name of hate speech is exactly what the Trump administration is doing.
Here's what the Trump administration did to Columbia University, from CNN on March 7:
We went over the letter that came from the Trump administration to Columbia. It’s not just that they demanded, not foreign students, but American students who protested Israel and the Israeli war in Gaza and the Biden administration's policy of financing that war. They demanded that American students, including American Jewish students, be severely punished, suspended and/or expelled. That was one of the Trump administration's demands of Columbia, and they have now started to expel citizens of the United States who participated in those protests.
On top of that, the Trump administration also demanded that the Columbia Middle East Studies program, which has been for decades a target of Israel's strongest loyalists in the United States – Bari Weiss got her start at Columbia, the anti-cancel culture queen, as a 19 and 20-year old agitating for all sorts of Arab professors or Israel critics to be fired. That was her starting point. Then, at some point, she rebranded herself as a free-speech warrior but never gave up those ideas.
Now, the Middle East studies program that the Bari Weisses of the world have long aided, has to be put under receivership, meaning someone from outside the department, no longer the chair of the department, controls what their curriculum is, obviously to make sure that it's pro-Israel. Our academic institutions and every professor who works there and everything that is taught must be aligned with the view of the Israeli government and supporters.
On top of that, they're demanding as well that this expanded hate speech definition of antisemitism, the IHRA definition that we've gone over many times before. You're not allowed to say the Jews killed Jesus, you're not allowed to accuse certain Jewish people of having primary loyalty to Israel, even if you think it's true. A whole long list of things. You can't apply “double standards” to Israel meaning you can't criticize them in a certain way unless you make sure you're criticizing every other country the same. You're not allowed to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you can say that about every other country freely, including the United States. It is actually, an assault to outlaw Israel critics and protests against Israel, including peaceful ones.
I'm telling you, right now, so far, the deportations have been confined to people who are green card holders. You're married to an American citizen, your wife is eight months pregnant, your American wife, she's about to give birth, and you get deported because you participated in a protest against Israel, even though you're a permanent resident here. But I'll tell you what is next. I promise you, what is next is that they're going to take American citizens who are naturalized American citizens, like Elon Musk or Melania Trump, people not born in the United States but who came to the United States and became naturalized, they're going to strip them of their citizenship and, because they're no longer citizens, they can be immediately deported, and they're going to deport them for the crime of criticizing Israel.
As I said, it's already affecting the free speech rights of Americans when you're imposing constraints on academic freedom at colleges. You're obviously affecting not just foreign students if you don't care about that, but also everyone on the campus, including American students, including Jewish students, sacred Jewish students who you want so badly to defend and protect and keep safe. You want to hold them close and hug them. You're also causing an erosion of the free speech rights of substantial minorities of Jewish students and Jews in general, who opposed the Israeli War in Gaza.
Since October 7, four different Ivy League American presidents have been forced out of their jobs all over the same issue, Israel, and allowing bigotry on campus to thrive – antisemitism. Two of them at Columbia, one at Harvard and one at the University of Pennsylvania. The latest Columbia president was just forced out on Friday, even though she agreed to all the Trump administration's terms. Someone claimed, The Free Press claimed, Bari Weiss's pro-Israel thing claimed, that she had said privately, “Yes, I'm agreeing to these, but I'm going to slow them off. We're not going to just rush and do this.”
The Trump administration and Israel supporters went ballistic and forced the second university president of Columbia out in a year and replaced her with somebody who actually has appeared on the stage of AIPAC to vow bipartisan loyalty to Israel to talk about the need to keep bipartisan support and financing of Israel. She's a Jewish woman who has appeared at AIPAC, and still, there's already a move to get rid of her, too, because she's insufficiently pro-Israel. You can be a Jewish woman who goes to AIPAC, gets up on the stage, and talks about the importance of keeping bipartisan support for Israel, and still be insufficiently pro-Isreal to the point where the government won't allow you to assume the presidency of Columbia.
Here from The Wall Street Journal, on Friday:
In America, the government isn't supposed to dictate the curriculum, the administration, the teaching, or what can be done at our lead colleges. That's supposed to be left up to academics and professors. That is what academic freedom means: the ability to teach and to express yourself how you want, free of government coercion and control. This would be like if the Biden administration came to universities and said, “We're going to take away all your funding unless you fire every last conservative. You still have a few conservatives on the campus, they oppose affirmative action, they oppose DEI. We think that's racist. You have to get rid of them.” Or who says that there are only two genders and that's transphobic and incites violence against trans people, you have to get rid of them. Do you think conservatives would be supporting that and saying, “Oh yeah, that's the role of the government, that is totally fine”? Of course not, they would be screaming that Joe Biden was a tyrant, they should be doing the same now that Trump is doing, which is just in defense of a different group.
Is this going on a crusade to purge bigotry from American campuses, using a combination of government coercion and control and expanded hate speech codes, what conservatives wanted? Because I had always understood that conservatives were deeply offended by those sorts of things and the reason I thought that was because they'd been screaming that for as long as I can remember.
One of the weird things, really weird things, is that there are a lot of members of the Republican Party in Congress who are not Jewish but who are more fanatical about Israel than almost every Jewish member of Congress. They love to speak for all Jewish people, they've irrigated to themselves the right to speak for Jewish people.
Here is Congressman Mike Lawler, of New York, who is not Jewish, despite how much he loves to purport to speak to Jewish people everywhere, kind of the white savior hero who comes down and protects all Jews. So grateful to him, so, so grateful. Kind of like a Robin D'Angelo type, but for Jews. And the new president of Columbia, the third one, is Claire Shipman, who, as I said, is a Jewish woman who has actually been at AIPAC. She's married to Obama's former press secretary, Jay Carney, who's served for the last decade as the spokesperson for Amazon. These are not actually far-left radicals. These are like corporatist types. Claire Shipman is very much pro-Israel.
But here is Mike Lawler on Friday saying she has to go because she's not Jewish enough. He quotes the tweet of the New York Post.
She's the third president. She barely is in office like six seconds and he's saying, “You're offensive to all Jewish people. Step down.” Who is Michael Lawler to speak for all Jewish students? Huge numbers of Jewish students participated in those protests, we had them on our show. In fact, so many Jewish students were participating in the protest that they had a Shabbat dinner every Friday night inside the protest encampment.
Here is Claire Shipman, the new president, who Michael Lawler and many others think is insufficiently pro-Israel to lead Columbia. Here she was on the stage at AIPAC with the Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a virulent supporter of Israel, obviously very bipartisan, and they talked about the need to maintain bipartisan support for AIPAC.
Here's just a little snippet.
Video. Claire Shipman, Chris Coons, AIPAC. March 6, 2018.
This is Columbia Spectator, on March 30
She was married to Jay Carney, who served as the White House press secretary under former president Barack Obama. It's a little background on her. This is not some far-left pro-Hamas radical or whatever they're trying to imply she is to force out the third Columbia president in the last seven months over this one foreign country.
Here is Minouche Shafik, who was testifying before the House and listening to what he had to say about Columbia's administration.
Video. Minouche Shafik, C-SPAN. April 17, 2024.
I am somebody who has spent eight years, denouncing what I regarded as baseless or excessive attacks on Donald Trump, attempts to malign him and fabrications of scandal. I don't just go around or flexibly criticize the Trump administration. But when I see, as somebody who really does believe in the Constitution, who really does believe in the value of free speech and academic freedom and free discourse and free protest and due process speaking of other issues as well, I'm not going to sit by and watch college campuses have their free speech rights destroyed in service of a foreign government and not say anything.
The same thing is now spreading to Harvard. This is from today, March 31.
The Trump administration is not threatening to withdraw federal funding for all universities, just the ones that they think are allowing too much anti-Israel speech.
Let me just read you this quote pretending this is coming from the Biden administration.
This administration [the Biden administration] has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow racism against black people, transphobia, or xenophobia to fester.
[…] [a senior official at the General Services Administration] added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”
Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, was not immediately available for comment. […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)
I should add that Harvard's current president is Jewish – and I think it's like six out of the last seven, have been Jewish. Many of their major donors are Jewish, their faculty is filled with people who are Jewish, who hold all kinds of views about Israel, some vehemently pro-Israel like Alan Dershowitz was all those decades he was at Harvard, some critical of Israel mildly but still supportive of Israel, some vocally – it's a diversity of opinion which is what we're supposed to have.
But he has previously emphasized the importance of federal money to the university’s operation.
[…] “We could not carry out our mission the way we do now without substantial federal research support, nor could we provide the benefits to the nation that we do now without that support,” Dr. Garber said in a December interview with The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)
Again, this is not studying undergraduate programs. This is funding the most sophisticated medical centers and hospitals and scientific research into cures. This is why we have these kinds of government funding.
Marc Andreessen, who was one of the people credited correctly with developing the modern internet, in the late 1990s – credited with developing the browser Netscape that was then sold to Microsoft – has now become a very vocal Trump supporter. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has people placed all around the Trump administration. He spent time at Mar-a-Lago, a lot of time, in the transition. He's a Trump supporter.
He gave an interview to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, on January 17, just a few days before the administration was to take office, the Trump Administration. The title was: “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms” - Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism. (The New York Times. January 17, 2025.)
But one of the things Marc Andreessen pointed out in this interview was that the reason the United States developed the internet, the reason the United States became a leader of the internet, the reason Silicon Valley exists and that drove so much American wealth is because the U.S. government-funded so many academic research institutions to do research into the internet, into browsing, into all of that. That's why we fund American academic institutions because it produces innovation that benefits the entire country. The U.S. government is not forced to fund research institutes at universities but it would cripple innovation in the United States if you did that.
But that's not even what's happening here. The Trump administration is not defunding American academic institutions. They're using that funding as leverage to force them to be less permissive about criticism of Israel on their campus. And they're all complying because as the President of Harvard said, we wouldn't be the leading academic institute that we were if we lost federal funding. It's not the classroom that makes us the leading Institute. It is that we can attract the leaders of each field, knowing that they'll have the opportunity to engage in research that leads to cures and to innovations, that then benefit the entire country. The Trump administration is not defunding universities. They're just using it as leverage to suppress speech they dislike.
Here from the Jewish News Syndicate on March 31, 2025, this happened on Friday night as well:
Head of Harvard’s Middle East studies center told to step down by end of year
Rabbi David Wolpe, a former member of Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, said that the change in leadership was “good news.” (Jewish News Syndicate. March 31, 2025.)
Just like they're changing the control of Columbia's Middle East study program, they're doing the same at Harvard now, so that people like Rabbi David Wolpe can step in, just like Benjamin Netanyahu was celebrating and like David Friedman was threatening, to outlaw criticism of Israel. They've always been very concerned that American academic institutions were the epicenter of protests against Israel. And this is not the first time, by the way, that disruptive protests have happened across American college campuses. It was one of the things that helped stop the Vietnam War. Protests were often violent and disruptive at colleges across the United States in the '60s against the Vietnam War in favor of the civil rights movement, far more so than these protests were.
One of the things that scares Israel and its supporters so much is that the epicenter of activism against the apartheid regime in South Africa that helped to bring it down was a protest movement throughout American campuses demanding that their schools divest from South Africa to bring down the apartheid regime. And that's why Israel wants to make it illegal. In many places in Europe, they've done so and have started to do so in the United States, too, to advocate a boycott of Israel.
So, Israel looks at the United States and they're like, where do we need to go to stop this growing sentiment against our country? Oh, well, TikTok. They allow a lot of Israel criticism. We need to ban that. The EDL said ban that, and that's what caused enough votes from the Democratic Party to finally ban TikTok – not in fear of China, but a fear that after October 7, TikTok was allowing too much pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speech. So, they got rid of TikTok, or at least, at some point, they're going to force a sale or ban it. And then college campuses are the other place, and that's what their target is. It's a foreign country targeting the civil liberties, free speech rights and academic freedom of our country, which have long been crucial to our country's prosperity.
If all that wasn't enough, here at NYU, as reported by the Canadian outlet CTV News on March 30, the headline: “Climate of Fear’: Montreal Doctor Says NYU Cancelled Her Presentation”
Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders said the abrupt cancellation speaks to the “climate of fear” universities in the U.S. are now living under in which they preemptively “self-censor” themselves to avoid retaliation. (CTV News. March 30, 2025.)
Doctors Without Borders is an organization that goes around to the most deprived and repressed places, usually in war zones, and they have volunteer doctors from around the world who go and work on the people who are facing starvation or need surgery because of bombs. It's like one of the most noble things you could do, become a doctor and then join Doctors Without Borders.
She was going to change her speech to appease NYU and, particularly, the Trump administration. She wasn't going to criticize the cuts to USAID quite harshly. She would tone down her rhetoric about how many people were killed in Gaza. I don't know if she was going to dilute the numbers to please the government. But even after she offered to edit the slides in her speech, she said the university apologized and said they had to cancel.
We have covered the individual cases of students who are legally in the United States who in secret, the State Department and Marco Rubio revoked their green card or their visa, meaning they weren't given notice to come and contest it or prove they didn't do anything wrong – they were just canceled summarily – and they instantly become illegal in the country and then they send ICE agents to accost them in their apartments or on the street, detain them and grab them, put them in a detention facility, and then ship them to Louisiana. Even though they have no connection with Louisiana: the government's hoping that Louisiana has more conservative judges who will defer to the Trump administration and deport people even if it's for their free speech rights.
The government is not collecting its own lists. They're relying on pro-Israel activist groups. Two in particular.
So, here's The New York Times on what happened. There you see the headline:
Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts
The university was told that the student’s visa had been terminated, its president said in a late-night email to students and faculty members.
The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, had a valid student visa as a doctoral student at Tufts, according to a statement from her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Ms. Ozturk, who is Muslim, was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends Tuesday night when she was detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security near her apartment in Somerville, Mass., Ms. Khanbabai said.
“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” the lawyer said. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”
A statement attributed to a senior spokesman for Homeland Security claimed on Wednesday that Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of” Hamas considered “grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” (The New York Times. March 26, 2025.)
Now, I think it's important to note here that just like you'll be called antisemitic if you criticize Israel too much, you'll also be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas if you oppose the Israeli war in Gaza, or question American funding and financing of Israel, or why the American taxpayer has to pay for Israel's wars. You'll immediately be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas. And this is a tactic from the war on terror that Bush and Cheney used all the time. If you said, hey, you're imprisoning people in Guantánamo and elsewhere indefinitely with no due process, and a lot of the people you're accusing have turned out to be innocent, shouldn't you give them a hearing? They would say, “You are pro-terrorist. Why are you defending terrorists?”
I get called pro-Hamas every day, even though I've never uttered a single peep of praise or support for Hamas, just like I haven’t for Putin. I'm called pro-Putin all the time. It's the tactic. I was called pro-terrorist when I was opposing the War on Terror and the civil liberties abuses.
When they say pro-Hamas, they don't mean someone praises Hamas or justifies Hamas, all you have to do is criticize Israel, and that's enough to be called pro-Hamas.
Here is the Washington Post, and this video circulated everywhere, showing how chilling this detention was. Remember, this is a person legally inside the United States who just gets accosted. Notice how her phone is taken while she's using it, which will enable Homeland Security then to look in her phone and find out who she's talking to, find out everything about her with no warrants. Watch what happens.
Video. The Washington Post, Tufts University. March 27, 2025.
You see an unmarked car that pulls up and just plainclothes officers, not even identified, get out. You wouldn't have any idea they were plain close. Ironically, they're wearing masks, even though the Trump administration is demanding that protesters get banned from wearing masks, and now they're costing her. She has her phone, and they just grab her. She has no idea who these people are. They could be anybody. She's a Ph.D. student. They grabbed her phone, forcibly grabbed her phone, and then they surrounded her and they detained her. She says, “Can I just speak to the cops?” And they say, “We are the police.” She had no idea that she was being detained by the police because they were in plain clothes, they have unmarked cars, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the student paper criticizing university leaders for their stance on the war in Gaza. That's her crime.
I mean, this looks like the most dystopian, repressive country you can think of, where you write an op-ed, you're a law-abiding citizen, you're a PhD student, you've never been charged with a crime in your life, and then a bunch of Homeland Security agents descend upon you, grab your phone, and then grab you, and put you in a prison, and ship you to Louisiana, a state you've never been to, have no connection with because they don't like an op-ed that you wrote? Not even the government doesn't even bother to claim that she did anything other than write the op-ed.
Here is the Assistant Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin, on March 26:
First of all, she has never, in her life, there's zero evidence, uttered a peep of support for Hamas. We don't even know that she participated in any protests. All we know is that she wrote an op-ed that is the only basis for her detention that anybody has cited, and there's nothing remotely in this op-bed that could be construed as supporting Hamas.
Notice this slimy rhetoric that Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. That is an absolute lie. Hamas is an organization devoted to one cause and purpose only, which is defending Gaza and Palestinians from what they perceive as aggression by Israel. They've never engaged in terrorism in the United States or targeted American citizens. This is one of the things that the Israeli supporters try to say about why the United States should go fight Israel's wars, that, oh, one of the remaining hostages, one of the only living remaining hostage, he was American, is still in Hamas custody.
Do you know why he ended up in Hamas custody, this American citizen? Because he left the United States to go to Israel, and he joined a foreign army, the IDF, and he was in uniform, in a tank, when Hamas took him. Usually, we'd call that a prisoner of war. He's an active-duty soldier. But the idea that if you're an American citizen and you go join some foreign army and as part of your fighting in that army, you get captured, now the United States has a responsibility to wage war to rescue you.
Obviously, if they join the American military and that happens, of course, the United States has a responsibility, but not when you go fight in a foreign army. They're using this, they're exploiting this to say, “Oh look, they are targeting Americans too.” They had a bunch of Thai citizens there. Do you think they're targeting Thailand? These are people who are in Israel.
Here's Marco Rubio when being asked about what the justification is for having deported this Turkish PhD student:
Video. Marco Rubio, C-SPAN. March 27, 2025.
She didn't do any of that. This is a completely deceitful statement designed to mask what they're actually doing. They promised mass deportations of people in the country illegally. They're not giving that to you. Joe Biden deported more people in these two months of last year than Donald Trump did. Obama deported way more. The immigration group's called Obama the Deporter-in-Chief because of how many people he deported.
They have closed the border almost entirely. It's down 94%. Sometimes the deportation count comes from deporting people when they're detained at the border. But there's nothing even remotely like mass deportations taking place of people in the United States illegally. Their priority is not even people in the United States illegally. Their priority is people who are in the United States who committed the ultimate crime of criticizing Israel and they're lying to justify it.
Everybody knows she didn't vandalize anything. No one suggests that she did anything illegal, anything aggressive, anything violent. The only reason she ended up on these lists of pro-Israel groups that are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in the United States is because she wrote this op-ed.
I want to show you that op-ed in a second, just to let you decide if you think it's anything radical, let alone remotely pro-Hamas or glorifying terrorism, other than unless you think that criticizing Israel or opposing Israel is inherently pro-terrorist, which is what a lot of people think. They just don't usually admit it.
Rubio’s claims are all false claims. False claims. Some of the leading protesters at Columbia who occupied Hamilton Hall were American Jewish students who are now expelled because the Trump administration required it. So, congratulations on protecting American Jews by getting them expelled from college for protesting. Fantastic. Jews all over are very grateful.
Their priority is to protect Israel from criticism and activism and none of the people who have been removed, certainly not the ones who have become controversial, did anything remotely like vandalize building. This is all Marco Rubio's fabrications.
Here is the criminal op-ed that this student wrote, along with three other students, at Tufts. And the headline is:
Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)
On March 4, the Tufts Community Union Senate passed 3 out of 4 resolutions demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.
Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body. … Although graduate students were not allowed by the University into the Senate meeting, which lasted for almost eight hours, our presence on campus and financial entanglement with the University via tuition payments and the graduate work that we do on grants and research makes us direct stakeholders in the University’s stance.
We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate and mischaracterize its resolution as divisive. … We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts.
We urge President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate. (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)
Is that like terrorist greed? Is that something that should result in your deportation, that you express views as a graduate student in a Tufts newspaper? A community in which you've been invited to participate, not just to study and keep your mouth shut. There's no free country in the world where that's the rule for entering the country.
Again, the government, Marco Rubio, is not finding these people. Homeland Security is not finding them, ICE is not finding them. ICE isn't even looking for them, they're here legally. They only become illegal when Marco Rubio secretly revokes their green card or their visa because they criticize Israel. So, how do they know where to find these people?
There are two incredibly shady pro-Israel groups connected to Israel. Typically, their funding is completely anonymous. There's been reporting on where they get funding. Who they are even is anonymous. One of them is the Canary Mission, and they have been around now for a decade. If a student expresses in a classroom criticism of Israel, they take the student's name and put them on a website that has been highly funded so that it's the first Google result. If you enter that student's name when they go apply for work, it'll be, here's a list of all the anti-Semites on American campuses, while they're doxing students and professors and putting their name on the internet, these cowards will not say or identify themselves, who's behind this Canary mission. They have been quite boastful of the fact that their list is the one Homeland Security and the State Department is using to determine who gets removed from the country.
In other words, pro-Israel fanatics are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in this country based on whether they love Israel or not, that is the literal truth of what is happening. I just don't understand how anybody who claimed to believe in free speech or the values of free discourse or academic freedom cannot be anything but enraged by this. Here's the Canary mission on March 27, boasting of their work to have her deported.
They’re claiming credit. And then here is what they have to say about her. There you see:
This is the kind of thing they do. They put the person's picture, their name, and they pay a lot of money to promote the website to make sure that it becomes the first Google search. So obviously, it's a blacklist, like a McCarthyite list, and they label someone a terrorist and pro-Hamas simply because they oppose Israel.
So, on their dossier that they say is what caused her deportation, they're admitting the primary offense or primary transgression is publishing that op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that they disliked because it was critical of Israel. And now the government is obeying these pro-Israel groups on who to deport, not based on crimes they committed or property they destroyed or people they harassed or attacked, but based on their ideas about one foreign country, published in a very professional, very moderately stated op-ed.
Here's another one of the groups that is taking credit for it as well: Betar Worldwide. It is a radical pro-Israel group, considered radical even in Israel. And they too took credit:
That's where the government's getting these names from, from these very sketchy Israel-connected groups of people they want out of the country for criticizing Israel.
Here's Tammy Bruce, the Department of State spokesperson being asked about all of this and here's what she said.
Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 31, 2025.
So, these groups are out there taking credit. These groups, by the way, only have one cause, one mission: devotion to Israel. The United States and Americans are not part of the agenda, just this foreign country of Israel. And they're boasting about the fact that they're the ones who are telling Homeland Security and the State Department who to deport. When asked about it, the State Department won't deny that, they won't even confirm. They won't say how they're getting these names. Tammy Bruce refused to say whether Betar and the Canary Mission, as we know they are because they say so, are giving these lists to the U.S. government – Betar basically gave a thumbs up to her, said “Good job,” a little pat on the head again from an Israeli group so many people in Washington crave and will do anything for.
Here is the Jewish newspaper Forward, on March 10, doing a little profile:
Jewish groups targeted Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil — then ICE arrested him
Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus called to #DeportMahmoudKhalil days before immigration agents detained him
Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to “escalate” the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.
Glick, the activist who discussed the Khalil case with Senate staffers, was until recently connected to a far-right Jewish group called Betar, which began compiling a list last fall of international students involved in the protests and shared the database with the Trump administration. (Forward. March 10, 2025.)
Here is one of the things that Betar sayd in their Twitter account, on February 20, 2025. You see there is a tweet from Laila Al-Arian, who's been on our show before and they comment:
You can blame Hamas, which I'm sure some of you do but any decent person by definition would lament the loss of this huge number of babies who didn't reach their first birthday and had their lives extinguished in this war. Not Betar who dictates to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay, they said on top of this list: “It's not enough, not enough. We demand blood in Gaza.” They looked at this endless list, these degenerates, these morally burdened creeps – you have to be a complete moral degenerate to look at a list of infants killed in a war, a long, long list, and say “It's not enough, we want more, we want more blood in Gaza.” That's who's in charge of deciding who loves Israel enough or not to stay in the United States.
These are the very noble people who are determining our immigration policy, not for illegal immigrants, for legal immigrants, whose crime is criticizing the foreign country that, for whatever reason, has an immense amount of influence in our own. Even though we pay for their wars and subsidize their society, it probably should be the other way around, we have a lot of influence on their country, but that's not how it works.
And then the New York Attorney General issued this statement on March 13 of this year:
Re: Betar US — a/k/a Betar Zionist Organization
Dear Ali Abunimah,
I am writing in response to your correspondence to the Attorney General's Charities Bureau concerning Betar US - Betar Zionist Organization.
… [We] have contacted Betar US — Betar Zionist Organization Inc. to notify them of the requirement to register with the Charities Bureau. (Office of the Attorney General, NY. March 13, 2025.)
Everything about them is just very sketchy. They will not say where their funding comes from, they will not say who they are, while they drag everybody else's name into the spotlight and now have control over the U.S. government's deportation policies.
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That's where we're headed. I know that there are a lot of people who are fine with it because they prioritize and revere Israel. And it's very, very difficult to get yourself to care about free speech when the views that you most hate are being targeted as opposed to the views that you agree with or feel an affinity with. But if you don't step up and defend free speech when it's those views that you most hate that are being silenced and punished and constrained and targeted, you don't actually believe in free speech at all.
