{"id":3248,"date":"2025-04-02T00:15:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T00:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3248"},"modified":"2025-04-02T00:15:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T00:15:08","slug":"this-is-not-about-antisemitism-palestine-or-columbia-its-trump-dismantling-the-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3248","title":{"rendered":"This Is Not About Antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It\u2019s Trump Dismantling the American Dream."},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n Pro-Palestinian students at a protest encampment at Columbia University in New York City on April 29, 2024.<\/span>
\n Photo: Fatih Aktas\/Anadolu via Getty<\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve lived a<\/span> lot of life but can\u2019t say I\u2019ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.<\/p>\n

On March 14, a day before the story broke<\/a> of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled <\/a>from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement <\/a>to Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan<\/a> was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.<\/p>\n

My body involuntarily began to tremble.<\/p>\n

Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had<\/a> with Mahmoud Khalil<\/a> six days before<\/a>, and just as they have attempted to do with other students<\/a> on Columbia\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t leave my apartment for four days.<\/p>\n

Dismantling the American Dream<\/h2>\n

The chaos unfurling at Columbia is no longer about Palestine, Israel, or divestment. And insofar as it ever was, the administration\u2019s ever-tightening grip on Columbia is not about antisemitism \u2014 and it is not at Harvard University, where the specter of antisemitism is being used to threaten funding there<\/a> just as it was at Columbia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is about freedom of speech, immigration policy, constitutional equality, police, and control over people\u2019s lives. The crackdown is a declaration about upward mobility and dictating what \u201copportunity\u201d looks like for different people.<\/p>\n

This is about Donald Trump\u2019s systematic and calculated dismantling of the American Dream, encapsulated in a singularly defining moment in American history. It\u2019s about McCarthyist accusations of \u201cantisemitism\u201d being leveraged as a scapegoat to justify Trump\u2019s ruthless and indiscriminate assault on international students.<\/p>\n

With the administration now unleashing on Harvard and other schools sure to come soon<\/a>, we are at a critical opportunity to come up for air and recognize that what is happening here under the auspices of rooting out \u201cantisemitism\u201d is, in fact, an assault on the American Dream. It\u2019s a program that runs counter to the values and liberties Columbia, many other universities,\u00a0 and the country as a whole espouse.<\/p>\n

An Immigration Policy of Terrorism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Unlike other forms of violence, terrorism is a tactic intended to rupture society. It is the deliberate use of physical and narrative violence wielded against symbolic victims to coerce, intimidate, and hijack established institutions and policies. Terrorism triangulates violence by targeting innocent victims for the purpose of igniting mass hysteria and chronic fear.<\/p>\n

Those four days holed up in my apartment after Noem tweeted a video of me offered a visceral glimpse into the terror that international students at Columbia and beyond experience every day.<\/p>\n

For Srinivasan, the line was much more direct: Noem exploited her terror as a marketing ploy to promote a new \u201cself-deportation\u201d app.<\/p>\n

Referring to Srinivasan\u2019s harried departure as a self-congratulatory gold star for a successful immigration policy \u2014 that is to say, the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policy of terror.<\/p>\n

This is the strategy of the federal government, abetted by Columbia, with its constant invocation of the specter of \u201cantisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Antisemitism at Columbia<\/h2>\n

Antisemitism at elite institutions is a very real and reprehensible problem. Yet accusations of \u201cantisemitism\u201d at Columbia now serve as a catch-all cudgel wielded to silence voices of dissent.<\/p>\n

Most ironically, this weaponization of the accusation has led to the silencing of Jewish student voices, and disregard for the real issues Jewish students and faculty face.<\/p>\n

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