He urges readers to “reclaim the college and be part of the coed motion to hold ahead the work of the previous yr.”
In an op-ed dictated to his lawyer from a detention facility in Louisiana, Columbia College graduate Mahmoud Khalil late final week condemned the Ivy League establishment’s complicity within the Trump administration’s concentrating on of Palestinian rights advocates and campus dissent extra broadly.
Khalil, who has said he’s a political prisoner, argued in the Friday op-ed that Columbia “laid the groundwork for my abduction” final month by U.S. Division of Homeland Safety brokers. The Trump administration’s detention of and energy to deport Khalil — who helped lead pupil protests in opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza — have sparked widespread alarm and backlash, a lot of it directed at Columbia.
“The logic utilized by the federal authorities to focus on myself and my friends is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook regarding Palestine,” Khalil wrote, pointing to the latest arrests of other international students who’ve spoken out in help of Palestinian rights.
Writing within the college’s every day pupil newspaper, Khalil famous that “Columbia has suppressed pupil dissent underneath the auspices of combating antisemitism,” an strategy additionally taken by the Trump administration, which said the arrest of Khalil was carried out in alignment with the president’s “government orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
“This establishment’s singular concern has all the time been the vitality of its monetary profile, not the protection of Jewish college students. This is the reason Columbia was all too joyful to embrace a superficial progressive agenda whereas nonetheless disregarding Palestine, and because of this it should quickly activate you, too,” he warned. “If there was any phantasm left, it shattered final week when the board of trustees executed a historic maneuver to grab direct management of the presidency. Slicing out their intermediary, the board appointed fellow trustee Claire Shipman to a place reserved for tutorial management. Who can nonetheless faux that is an academic establishment and never the ‘Vichy on the Hudson’?”
“Confronted with a motion for divestment they couldn’t crush, your trustees opted to set fireplace to the establishment they’re entrusted with,” Khalil continued. “It’s incumbent upon every of you to reclaim the college and be part of the coed motion to hold ahead the work of the previous yr.”
Khalil and his authorized group are at present combating the Trump administration’s effort to take away him from the nation. Earlier this month, a second federal choose rejected the Trump administration’s request to switch Khalil’s case to Louisiana, a requirement that civil liberties advocates decried as a ploy to “manipulate federal court docket jurisdiction” with a view to obtain a positive ruling.
Donna Lieberman, government director of the New York Civil Liberties Union — which is representing Khalil — pressured in an NBC Information op-ed final week that Khalil “has by no means been accused, charged, or convicted of any crime.”
“The Trump administration is sending a message to everybody in America: If you happen to dare to disagree with the president, you can be punished,” Lieberman wrote, alluding to a fight over federal funding. “Columbia was simply the primary goal. Harvard and Princeton are actually at risk of comparable remedy. It is a full-scale assault on the system of free inquiry, dialogue, and debate that’s on the core of upper training, which is so essential to the energy of our democracy.”
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