What do our rights of free speech, assembly in protest, a free press, fair and equal justice for all, and the pursuit of truth look like in Vichy America today?

      As written by Anna Betts in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Reeks of McCarthyism’: outrage after Ice detains Palestinian student activist: Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil a ‘targeted, retaliatory’ attack on his first amendment rights, say civil rights groups; “Free speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage after a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was arrested and detained over the weekend.

     Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities on Saturday night, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.

     His attorney, Amy Greer, said that Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was in his university-owned apartment building, just a few blocks from Columbia’s main campus in New York, when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building on Saturday night and took him into custody.

     Greer said the authorities also declined to tell his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant, why Khalil was being detained.

     “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech,” Greer said, adding that a habeas corpus petition had been filed on Khalil’s behalf challenging the validity of his arrest and detention.

     The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed the arrest of Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, and alleged that Khalil’s activism constituted “activities aligned to Hamas”.

     At first, it was reported that Khalil was taken to an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, but his wife said she could not locate him there. As of Monday morning, it appeared that he was now listed as being in Ice custody at La Salle detention facility in Louisiana.

     Khalil served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators. According to Reuters, he was not among the students who occupied a campus building.

    More recently, according to the Associated Press. Khalil was reportedly among several students under investigation by a new Columbia committee that has brought disciplinary charges against dozens of students for their pro-Palestinian activism.

     A Columbia spokesperson told the Associated Press over the weekend that law enforcement officials needed a warrant to enter university property but did not disclose whether the school had received a warrant for Khalil’s arrest.

     The university recently issued guidance on “potential visits to campus” by Ice, where it states that “exigent circumstances” may allow Ice to access “university buildings or people without a warrant”.

     Khalil’s detention has sparked outrage from civil rights groups and first amendment organizations and advocates.

     Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that “arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes”.

     He said that universities “must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself” and must “make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law”.

     Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, condemned Khalil’s detention as a “targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his first amendment rights”.

     “The unlawful detention of Mr Khalil reeks of McCarthyism,” Lieberman said. “It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr Khalil for expressing views that aren’t Maga-approved – which is a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration law.”

     Lieberman warned that “ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus” and said that “political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation”.

     The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) emphasized that “anyone facing arrest and detention must be afforded due process” stating that just as students and demonstrators “are obliged to abide by lawful rules of conduct, our government must abide by the first amendment”.

     “The government must be clear and transparent about the basis for its actions to avoid chilling protected speech,” the statement added.

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations highlighted that Khalil is a lawful permanent resident with no criminal charges and called the detention “lawless” and a violation of free speech rights, immigration laws and the humanity of Palestinians.

     While the state department can rescind visas, Elora Mukherjee, director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School told the New York Times that revoking a green card was relatively rare and usually only occurs after criminal convictions.

     Mukherjee said that if the government were to revoke Khalil’s green card “in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the first amendment of the US constitution”.

     Eli Northrup, a New York City public defender and policy advocate, said on social media that “no matter what your views are on Israel & Palestine, you should be terrified of a country incarcerating its residents for exercising free speech.”

     Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement that “Khalil and all people living in the United States are afforded due process.

     “A green card can only be revoked by an immigration judge, showing once again that the Trump administration is willing to ignore the law in order to instill fear and further its racist agenda” Awawdeh said.

     Several New York City lawmakers, leaders and advocates also criticized Khalil’s arrest and called for his release.

     Zohran Mamdani, the Queens assembly member and mayoral candidate, called the arrest “a blatant assault on the first amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump”.

     The New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, also running for mayor, described the arrest as unconstitutional, and argued that deporting individuals for their speech does not make any community safer.

     “Ice’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is an unconstitutional and egregious violation of the first amendment, and a frightening weaponization of immigration law,” Lander said. “I disagree strongly with things that were said in the protests he reportedly led. But it will not make Jews – or any of us – safer for the federal government to deport people for saying things we may find hateful.”

     The student workers union at Columbia University called on Columbia university leadership to protect their international students. “By allowing Ice on campus, Columbia is surrendering to the Trump administration’s assault on universities across the country and sacrificing international students to protect its finances,” the union said.

     The Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who represents Washington state, also took to social media, describing the arrest as “unacceptable” and a violation of free speech rights.

    “The Trump admin is going after students who have used their first amendment, constitutional rights,” Jayapal wrote. “Deporting legal residents solely for expressing their political opinions is a violation of free speech rights. Who’s next? Citizens?”

     While first amendment groups have condemned the arrest, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association praised the move on social media on Sunday, calling it “exactly what needs to happen to restore order to campuses like Columbia and our country”.

     The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that describes its focus as fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate, also said on Sunday that they “appreciate the Trump administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism” and said that Khalil’s arrest “further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions”.

     But the group emphasized that any deportation, revocation of a green card or visa “must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protection”.

     Khalil’s arrest comes as Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to revoke the student visas of foreign students in the US who are involved in protests against the war in Gaza, and that he would imprison “agitators”.

     Just a few days ago, the Trump administration announced that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University because of what it alleges is the college’s failure to address antisemitism on campus.

     Columbia was central to the campus protests that broke out last spring across the US and internationally over the war in Gaza, with students demanding an end to US support for Israel and university divestment from companies linked to Israel.

     At Columbia, these protests resulted in mass arrests, suspensions and the resignation of the university’s president.

     One of the groups that played a key role in organizing these protests was Jewish Voice for Peace, who describe themselves as the “largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world”.

     On Monday, Jonah Rubin, the senior manager of campus organizing for JVP said that that Khalil’s arrest was designed to instill terror “throughout immigrant communities and social justice movements on college campuses”.

     “Even as we work to free Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia and every other college and university must stop complying with the illegal and unconstitutional orders of the Trump regime, and must start taking active measures to protect their students,” Rubin said.

     Before his arrest, Khalil had told Reuters that he feared that he would be targeted by the federal government.

     “Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system,” he told the outlet.

     A protest was scheduled for Monday afternoon in New York to demand Khalil’s release. A petition for his release has already garnered more than 800,000 signatures.”

     As written by Moustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment should not happen in a democracy: The Columbia University graduate’s arrest is an attempt to destroy free thinking while murdering due process; “Forced disappearance, kidnapping, political imprisonment – take your pick. These terms all describe what has happened with the Trump administration’s first arrest for thought crimes, something that should never happen in a democracy.

     But it has, to Mahmoud Khalil, a recently graduated master’s student from Columbia University’s school of international and public affairs. And for each minute that Khalil is held in detention, every one of us should feel like our own individual rights in this country are being shredded. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is a barefaced attempt by the Trump administration to destroy free thinking while murdering due process and free speech along the way. This is an ominous development.

     On the evening of Saturday 8 March, Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US (a green card holder), and his US-citizen wife, who is eight months pregnant, were returning home to their Columbia University apartment in upper Manhattan. According to reports, the couple had just unlocked the door to the building when plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security pushed their way in like thugs and demanded Khalil surrender himself for arrest.

     The lead agent told Khalil’s lawyer, whom Khalil had immediately called, that his student visa was being revoked. But Khalil doesn’t have a student visa for the very simple reason that he is a lawful permanent resident! Apparently confused, the agent next responded that Khalil’s green card was being revoked – which, by US law, cannot be done without a lot of due process. When pressed by Khalil’s lawyer to show a warrant for arrest, the agent simply hung up on the lawyer, shoved Khalil into handcuffs, and carted him away. As of this writing, Khalil is in a detention facility in Louisiana.

     Let’s be clear. If you grew up in Egypt or Nicaragua or Russia, you would recognize this behavior. If you have read the work of Milan Kundera or Ariel Dorfman or Breyten Breytenbach, you will recognize this behavior. This is how the authoritarian regimes always operate, seeking to demonize their critics and neutralize their opposition by lies, exaggerations and the blunt force of state power. This despicable and dangerous conduct has now come to the land of the free and the home of the brave as official policy.

     The Trump administration doesn’t even bother to disguise the ideological assault that characterizes Khalil’s arrest. Khalil was an active member of Columbia University’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, a war that has been characterized as a genocide by Israel by experts and multiple human rights organizations around the world. Khalil also served as a negotiator between the university administration and student activists who had set up an encampment on campus.

     It was in that role that Khalil’s profile grew, particularly among extreme rightwing organizations supporting Israel that began sending lists of students to the Trump administration who, they said, should be deported from the US because of their views. This blatant attempt to shut down free speech picked up after Donald Trump issued two executive orders in late January that called for deporting “perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment”. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the Trump administration is actively canceling every form of protection for other minority populations, while appearing deeply concerned about antisemitism, as it also tacitly supports antisemitic behavior.)

     Khalil had already suffered so much harassment by these pro-Israel groups that the day before his arrest, he wrote to the interim president of Columbia University, telling her that he was afraid that government officials or private actors would target him or his family, urging her to provide him legal support and protection. After his arrest, the official White House account on X issued a post that said: “Shalom, Mahmoud,” using a Hebrew word that can mean goodbye. Haha. Whoever wrote the post must think this very clever. But in a court of law, the post will only buttress the argument that Trump is on a rampage to shut down any types of speech he doesn’t like.

     Exactly which crime has Mahmoud Khalil committed? Which activities has he engaged in to warrant arrest and deportation? The best the Department of Homeland Security can come up with are the same flimsy innuendo that we hear over and over again. Any show of concern for Palestinians is, presto, turned into “activities aligned to Hamas”.

     That “aligned to Hamas” is not a legal standard is hardly surprising. It comes after all from the Trump administration, which operates almost definitionally as the opposite of a legal standard. Expecting something reasonable from this administration is like eating a razor-blade sandwich and thinking you won’t come out all bloodied, which is of course why the Trump administration is repeatedly offering you such aromatic and enticing fresh bread.

     I expect as much from Trump, but I demand more from Columbia University, my own alma mater. After Trump withdrew some $400m of federal funding over an unproven and completely ideologically driven allegation that Columbia was a hotbed of antisemitism, the interim president didn’t bother to defend her institution. Instead, she immediately sent us Columbia affiliates an email to “assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns”. I’m educated enough to know that the word “appeasement” has a specific history. I also know that cowards run away from Palestine, even if they too will be the ones who suffer in the end.

     I also demand more from my local officials. This federal assault on protected speech from a New Yorker should raise huge alarms from the mayor of New York, but all we’ve heard from Eric Adams thus far is … well, what sound would crickets make if they were flying business class on Turkish Airlines? If it’s any sound at all, I imagine the jet engine hums louder than the lack of objection he’s made. His silence is matched only by Andrew Cuomo, Adams’s new competition for the next New York mayoral race. Together, they might have enough courage to lose a game of chicken to the lion in the Wizard of Oz.

     But mostly, I demand a whole lot more from the Democratic party. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? They seem to believe the best way to defend free speech in this country is not to speak at all. Irrelevance has never been so recognizable.

     Democracy has always been a fragile, improvised, teetering wall of bricks that extends high in the air. It takes a lot of people to support it, but it gives quickly when faced with pressure from the other side. The thing is, even if you’re not supporting it, you’ll still get crushed when the wall falls. Too many people seem ready to be crushed. That’s only the tiniest reason to support Mahmoud Khalil. We all need to rush to the wall and do what we can to free him from his unjust imprisonment. For him and also for us. Because, you know what? He won’t be the last.”

     What of the charge of antisemitism levelled by a state complicit in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel, as repression of dissent?

     As I wrote in my post of May 19 2024, Is Zionism Fascism? Is Protest Against the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians Antisemitism and Hate Speech?

     The question of whether an author’s historical claim to stand with Israel makes them a Zionist and a fascist was posed in an online forum, as Israel violates Biden’s Red Line and begins the assault on the refugees of Rafah, reverse face of the question of whether protest against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians constitutes antisemitism and hate speech. Among the first objections to these questions was that an author’s ideology has nothing to do with their work rather than emerging from it, of which we in the group are all members of a fandom.

     Here is my reply:

      Actually a very relevant and complex question. Why must one peoples Return mean another’s Exile? Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?

      Netanyahu and his settler regime and apologists would like everyone, especially their own citizens, to conflate being Israeli with being Jewish, and to use fear to centralize power to a carceral state of force and control and legitimize their authority as necessary to security. But none those things are true, and security is an illusion.

      The idea of Israel as an empire of tyranny and terror is antithetical to an Israel founded to protect Jewish peoples from tyranny and terror. The Netanyahu regime and the Occupation which long precedes it are subversions of Zion as a refuge for the powerless, the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and also a dark mirror of Judaism as the work of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.

      Marx began Das Capital with an eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem and the limitless possibilities of a humankind free from the profit motive as an analogy of Original Sin, and free from its praxis as the reduction of human relations to cash exchange. There are far more such possible futures of becoming human together through love rather than fear, more than we can now imagine.

       Friends, everything the enemy says is a lie; never let them define the terms of debate or the rules of the game.

     Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now rule most of our world, and to this I say Never Again! Regardless of whose name those who wish to enslave us claim to act as a strategy of our subjugation and dehumanization.

      No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of being human, of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

     As I wrote in my post of December 11 2023, What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money; Free speech ends where hate and violence begin; and dehumanization is criminal incitement to violence.

     Yes, but what is hate speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who decides what is permitted, and how shall we enforce limits on each other’s freedoms?

     Such questions about our fundamental rules of how to be human together are now being fought out on university campuses throughout our nation and the world, which pit student mass protests against the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza against repression of dissent by authority both within education systems and between institutions of education and those of the state, and often shaped by the special interest money which has been allowed to define the terms of the debate.

     In large part the world has accepted the state of Israel’s claim that criticism of its use of force inclusive of vast war crimes in Gaza is anti-semitism. There are two problems with this; first, Palestinians and Israelis are both semites, one people divided by history as faith, ethnicity, and national identity weaponized in service to power. Second, this falsification is deployed globally by the state of Israel to both defend and subjugate the Jewish diaspora by enforcing identification of being Jewish with the state of Israel, which also deflects questioning of its brutal colonial-Apartheid settler regime.

     We must beware those who claim to speak and act in our name, and most especially commit unforgiveable acts to make us complicit in their crimes, for this is a strategy of fascist tyranny.

     Netanyahu’s settler regime, founded on conquest and theft of indigenous people’s lands as manifest destiny authorized by God in imitation of our own  Conquest of the Native Americans, and on the Apartheid system of Bantustans which was also modeled on our own reservation system, the state of Israel institutionalized as a military society designed as a refuge for and avenger of Jews, and the whole Zionist ideology of identitarian politics and a nation of one faith and one blood, remains today the world’s most extreme and dangerous fascist successor state to the Nazis.

      But this need not remain so. Israel would very much like to convince her own citizens and all of us that to be a Jew is to be a member and figure of the state of Israel, and that to call out and oppose the state of Israel for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza is to be guilty of hate crime against Jewish people, but this is a lie, and one of many.

     So we come to this final question; how do we oppose state tyranny and terror without confusing and conflating a state with the people it claims to speak and act for? How answer division with solidarity?

     Netanyahu has incited anti Jewish hate as well as anti Israeli horror at his atrocities and war crimes. When a state demonizes itself before the world, it is the diasporic population of those it claims to act in service of as legitimation of power who suffer first. This is a primary strategy of fascism; making those in whose name it claims to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. But the use of force obeys Newtons Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce and resistance. The crimes of Israel have reawakened a slumbering monster and put every Jewish person and community at risk. We must now bring regime change, peace, and democracy to Israel or witness the return of the global Fourth Reich and its policies of Judenfrei.

     Save the Jews; bring down the Israeli state.

      Herein we may find guidance in Jean Genet’s restatement of Nietzsche’s principle of how those who hunt monsters become monsters themselves in the use of violence to enforce authorized identities and ideas of virtue; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”

    Yesterday we witnessed a ray of light pierce the immense darkness of our moment, in twin events of fracture on both of the primary fronts of the Gaza War; in the Israeli regime of tyranny and terror and in America’s complicity in the atrocities and crimes against humanity of our colony and proxy state. On the Israeli front, Benny Gantz threatens to leave the coalition government which would bring it down unless Netanyahu stops the genocide, and on the American front Biden for the first time in the history of the American-Israel partnership aligns us with the principle of our universal human rights inclusive of Palestinians as fellow human beings in an empathetic speech which defines goals of peace and equality in the region and reveals that he is working on solutions rather than obstructing them and abetting the atrocities of Israel, something I wish he would have communicated with us all on October 7.

      To clarify, Biden personally, our government, and our nation will forever bear a measure of responsibility for how the immense arsenal we provide Israel has been used, regardless of what may happen next. For these crimes against humanity both Netanyahu and Biden among many others belong in the same court as Milosevic. Nothing in this must divert our gaze from the future and the possibilities for change which Biden and Gantz have now offered us. In both Israel and America, we now have agents of change speaking not merely of ceasefire, but also of our future and solutions which might allow us to emerge from the legacies of our history.

     America and Israel have been partners in a Faustian bargain; in its wake we believed the Holocaust proved that only power is real and has meaning, embraced the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, and with the centralization of power to authority forged carceral states of force and control and of imperial conquest and dominion. 

     But now the tide begins to turn.

      As Biden said in his historic Morehouse College speech; “It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire to stop the fighting, bring the hostages home, and I’ve been working on a deal as we speak.”

     “This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about it. I know it angers and frustrates many of you, including my family, but most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.”

     Tyranny blinks, and we must seize the moment. As Edwin Markham wrote in Preparedness;

 “For all your days prepare,

   And meet them ever alike:

When you are the anvil, bear—

   When you are the hammer, strike. “

    In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; let us use ours not to dehumanize and enslave others, but to restore our humanity and to liberate each other. As the lyrics of the beautiful elegiac song in the series Wednesday goes, nothing else matters.

     As written by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, in an article entitled Trump Is Viciously Cracking Down on Free Speech: The detention and possible deportation of former Columbia University student and pro-Palestine organizer Mahmoud Khalil is the most serious attack on the First Amendment by any president in years; “ast Tuesday, President Donald Trump told Congress, “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” Not even a week later, his administration has arrested a permanent resident, summarily revoked his green card, and is getting ready to deport him — all because they don’t like his constitutionally protected speech.

     The detention and possible deportation of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, is the most serious attack on the First Amendment by any president in years. The twenty-first century has seen US administrations routinely trample over free speech, whether George W. Bush’s spying on Muslim American leaders, the surveillance and torture of whistleblowers and journalists like Julian Assange, or the US government’s involvement in tech censorship. This move is arguably more extreme than all of them.

     According to multiple reports and statements, Khalil, a permanent resident who was one of the leaders of the student antiwar protests at Columbia over the past year and a half, was arrested by ICE agents after they entered in-campus housing. The ICE agents reportedly also threatened to arrest his wife, a US citizen eight months pregnant with their baby, and claimed his student visa had been revoked. When informed that Khalil was not on a student visa but rather had a green card — one step away from full citizenship, in other words — the agents were at first confused, then, after a phone call, claimed that had been revoked, too. When asked by his attorney to provide her with a warrant, they simply hung up the phone.

     Until very recently, neither Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer, nor his wife knew where he even was. Despite first being told he was being held at an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his wife was informed he was not actually there when she tried to visit him yesterday morning. He is now confirmed to have been sent 1,300 miles away to Louisiana. It all has unmistakable, disturbing echoes of the lawless practice of forced disappearances common in Latin American dictatorships during the Cold War.

     Meanwhile, as outrage has built over the past twenty-four hours, the Trump administration has doubled down. Just today, the White House proudly touted Khalil’s arrest, charging he had “led activities aligned to Hamas” and warning his was “the first arrest of many to come.”

     “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted about the incident.

     “Law Enforcement enforcing the rule of law,” commented Katie Miller, a Trump advisor and wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

     But this is the opposite of the rule of law. Green cards can’t summarily be revoked by the president or his secretary of state — it can only be done by an immigration judge. And they certainly can’t be canceled because the holder has opinions or took part in protests that the president and his political party don’t like.

     Green cards can be revoked if the permanent resident commits certain crimes, including joining or materially supporting a terrorist organization — this is presumably what Khalil is supposed to have done to get himself targeted by ICE. But neither the government nor his detractors have given any actual evidence that he’s materially supported Hamas, or even that he’s so much as said anything supportive of the organization. Instead, they are recklessly stretching that definition to charge that his antiwar activism is tantamount to giving money to or working on behalf of Hamas.

     A month ago, I warned that Trump’s mass deportation program threatened the rights of US citizens and permanent residents, who have been repeatedly swept up in raids, detained, and even deported by ICE in the past, including just the past month. What we’re seeing with Khalil’s case is that the Trump administration — which came into office on the promise of “mass deportations” of undocumented immigrants, specifically training its ire on violent criminals — is now radically extending the tools and authorities it uses for that group to not just target legal immigrants with no criminal or violent histories, but to weaken the rights of all Americans.

     A permanent resident has been effectively disappeared by the government, had his legal status revoked, and is set to be thrown out of the country, without trial or any sort of due process at the whim of those in power. It is only a step away from saying you can do something like this to a permanent resident to saying you can do it to a citizen, as long as those citizens meet certain requirements of one person’s definition of non-Americanness, of course — having the wrong opinions, or the wrong heritage, or being naturalized, for example. In fact, this case is already wreaking havoc on one citizen’s life: Khalil’s pregnant wife, who, if he is deported, will effectively be forced out of her own country to be with her husband.

      The Trump administration is not just targeting legal immigrants with no criminal or violent histories, but weakening the rights of all Americans.

This has crossed over with another thread in the not-yet-two-month-old Trump presidency: its hostility to Americans’ free speech and other basic constitutional rights on behalf of Israel.

     What has happened to Khalil was advocated by the Heritage Foundation in its “Project Esther,” a plan for crushing the pro-Palestinian movement that it released a month before last year’s election. Two of its chief goals were to force “leaders and members” of pro-Palestinian organizations, which it deceptively defines as “Hamas Supporting Organizations” to “voluntarily depart” or be “deported from the U.S.”

     As with all attacks on free speech, Trump’s move here makes everyone’s rights less secure, including those of his own supporters. The Trump administration is currently going over Israel’s head and angering its officials by taking the unprecedented step of negotiating directly with Hamas for a decade-long cease-fire without Israel being at the table. It’s hard to see how, under the warped definition the administration is using in Khalil’s case, this couldn’t cynically be construed as materially supporting Hamas, too.

     If Trump voters who are permanent residents voice support for these negotiations, are they liable to be arrested and deported, too, by a future administration? What if they support a cease-fire in Ukraine? Legislation to officially designate Russia a state sponsor of terror was being pushed as recently as last year.

     It doesn’t even have to involve foreign policy. The Trump administration here is opening the door for a future Democratic administration to politically retaliate against conservative students and other immigrants for holding conservative views: on abortion for instance (where anti-choice organizations have carried out terrorist attacks in the past), or gender issues more broadly, a movement whose high-profile right-wing figures like Andrew Tate have carried out shocking crimes like human trafficking and rape of a minor.

     It’s yet another unfortunate example of the rights of Americans being undermined for the sake of a foreign country, in this case Israel. Under Joe Biden, Israel was allowed to kill multiple Americans without even a slap on the wrist. Under Trump, a permanent resident is being arrested and deported because he dared criticize the country.

     This attack on free speech is happening thanks to silence or even complicity from liberal institutions. Democratic officials have been slow to react with the kind of outrage they mobilized against Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. (We have asked for comment from Senator Chuck Schumer and other members of Congress from New York, where Khalil lives, and will update the story if they come.)

     The reason Khalil came in the government’s crosshairs in the first place is because he was one of dozens of Columbia students being investigated by the university over their pro-Palestinian activism, after the school was threatened by Trump with withdrawing government money — which Trump has now taken away anyway, despite the university choosing to disgracefully go after its own students, canceling $400 million in grants and contracts, or about 6 percent of its total funding.

     New Yorkers are planning to take over Federal Plaza in New York to protest Khalil’s treatment, while a petition demanding his release has drawn more than a million signatures in less than a day. These are appropriate responses to such a brazen and blatantly unconstitutional assault on the First Amendment. But many more Americans around the country should be up in arms.”

     Of the glorious and heroic Resistance to state sponsorship of genocide, imperial conquest and dominion, and to tyranny and terror both by America and her colony Israel, a Resistance of the future against the legacies of our history,  Nina Lakhani has written in The Guardian in an article entitled ‘Do not bow’: ex-Black Panther praises pro-Palestinian student protesters from prison: Mumia Abu-Jamal tells New York City students they’re on the right side of history by deciding ‘not to be silent and to speak out’; “In a powerful and rousing live address to students at the City University of New York (Cuny) on Friday night, the incarcerated Black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal praised the pro-Palestinian movement growing at US colleges as being on the right side of history.

     “It is a wonderful thing that you have decided not to be silent and decided to speak out against the repression that you see with your own eyes,” Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, said while calling from Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy state prison. “You are part of something massive, and you are part of something that is on the right side of history.

     “You’re against a colonial regime that steals the land from the people who are Indigenous to that area. I urge you to speak out against the terrorism that is afflicted upon Gaza with all of your might, all of your will and all of your strength. Do not bow to those who want you to be silent.”

     As hundreds of students and supporters at the Cuny encampment in Harlem cheered, he continued, “This is the moment to be heard and shake the earth so that the people of Gaza, the people of Rafah, the people of the West Bank, the people of Palestine can feel your solidarity with them.”

     Abu-Jamal was a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther party and went on to become a radio journalist as well as president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Association of Journalists. In 1982, he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia in 1981.

     Abu-Jamal spent almost three decades in solitary confinement on death row before his death sentence was overturned by a federal court, citing irregularities in the original sentencing process.

     A prolific writer on Black struggle and critic of the US criminal justice system, Abu-Jamal is serving life without parole, and his supporters regard him as a political prisoner.

     Student protests calling for divestment in Israel have spread across the US in the past 10 days – in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation cause as well as the Columbia University students who were arrested and suspended after administrators allowed the NYPD on to campus.

     Cuny is the largest public urban college in the US, with a large working-class Black and brown student and teaching body, with 25 campuses across the city’s five boroughs.

     The mood on Friday night in Harlem was buoyant despite the cold. Students wrapped up in donated blankets amid Shabbat rituals, Muslim community prayers, lectures and the screening of documentaries about the history of student protests, the South African apartheid regime and the Palestinian struggle.

     Nationwide, students – and a growing number of faculty – are demanding administrators disclose and divest from funds and corporations doing business with Israel in it. Those include Amazon and Google, which are part of a $1.2bn cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government, as well as manufacturers of weapons and other military equipment.

     Police have responded with brutality on some campuses, such as at Emory University in Atlanta, provoking international condemnation – and, in turn, more student protests.

     Joe Biden and many lawmakers have criticized the protesters as “antisemitic” despite the fact that Jewish students who reject Zionism are organizing many of the college protests.

     In response to the 7 October Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis and resulted in the kidnappings of more than 200 others, Israel has killed at least 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with thousands more buried under the rubble and presumed dead.

     Deaths from starvation and extreme heat are rising, according to UN agencies, amid ongoing Israeli attacks and blockades stopping the delivery of humanitarian aid that some US officials acknowledge could be a violation of international law.

     As the Israeli military appears to be preparing to launch an attack on Rafah in southern Gaza, where a million Palestinians have been displaced, Abu-Jamal urged students to expand protests.

     “The people of Gaza are fighting to be free from generations of occupation so it is not enough, brothers and sisters, it is not enough to demand a ceasefire,” he said. “Make your demand cease occupation, cease occupation, and let that be your battle cry because that is the call of history of which all of you are part.

     “You are part of something magnanimous, magnificent and soul changing, and history changing. Do not let go of this moment, make it bigger, make it more massive, make it more powerful, make it echo up into the stars. I am thrilled by your work – I love you.”

     The students erupted into chants of “brick by brick, wall by wall, free Mumia Abu-Jamal”.

     Abu-Jamal has a track record of supporting student movements and has been invited as a commencement speaker by numerous colleges. He participates in those commencements through recordings.

     He has published dozens of essays and several books – including 2017’s Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? – about his time on death row and the history of the Black Panthers.

     Cuny voted to divest from South Africa in 1984 by cutting ties with companies supporting the apartheid regime. Columbia was the first Ivy League university to sever financial links with the apartheid regime.”

     As I wrote in my post of October 24 2024, Universities Attack Protests by Jewish Peace Activists on Sukkot; This Sukkot, American universities attack protests by Jewish peace activists calling for divestiture of investment in war industries complicit in genocide and other crimes against humanity in Palestine and Lebanon.

    So it has been with our entire nation for longer than I have been alive, and though I have fought to save something of our humanity since the 1982 Siege of Beirut, all over our dark and brutal world, and won some few victories, on the whole I am failing.

    Tens of thousands of American, Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese peoples have protested their annihilation, dehumanization, and enslavement by a Zionist state of tyranny and terror, and of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. Yet even our most liberal regime in America, led by Genocide Joe and Kommandant Kamala, refuse to stop funding and arming Israel’s criminal war against humanity.

     Trump of course would be far worse and more terrible, should he recapture the state, for he is Netanyahu’s ally and the October 7 2023 attack was planned jointly by Hamas and the Netanyahu regime to divide America and shoehorn Trump back into power where he will fully support Israel’s imperial conquest and dominion of the whole Middle East.

     We must stop trump and elect Kamala on November 5, but this does not mean turning a blind eye to our complicity in genocide and state terror, in America or in the Holy Lands.

     Resistance begins with truth telling and solidarity of action, and this is the primary ground of struggle now unfolding on our university campuses and in our elections.

     We are offered a false dichotomy between Kommandant Kamala and Traitor Trump; we can keep both our democracy and our universal human rights. If we refuse to submit, abandon not our fellows, and find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of our nation and our civilization again, and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

     God bless America, and God Bless Us, Every One; we’re going to need it.

    As written by Chris Walker in Truthout, in an article entitled Jewish Students Blast Universities for Actions Against Sukkot Demonstrations: Universities destroyed sukkah shelters and stood by while students were harassed by bigots, Jewish Voice for Peace said; “Multiple Jewish-led organizations on college campuses across the country marked the end of the religious holiday of Sukkot this week by calling for their universities to divest from Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

     Sukkot commemorates the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the wilderness, led by Moses, after they were freed from enslavement in Egypt. The holiday is often celebrated by constructing temporary structures called sukkahs, meant to remind the Jewish people of their ancestors’ displacement. This year, Jewish students adorned their sukkahs on campus with messages of solidarity with Palestinians, noting that the tradition has taken on increased resonance as Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign has displaced millions of Palestinian families in Gaza over the past year.

     Around 18 college chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) took part in the demonstrations, with other student groups joining them across the country. According to a press release shared with Truthout by JVP, students built Gaza solidarity sukkahs at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Brown, Columbia, the University of Washington, the University of Rochester, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, the University of North Carolina, Swarthmore, UCLA, Bryn Mawr, MIT, Rutgers, UC San Diego, Occidental, and more.

        The sukkah demonstrations included teach-ins, prayer services, sacred meals, and other programs intended to foster understanding of the genocide and promote divestment and an arms embargo on Israel.

     On many campuses, administrators responded to the demonstrations by ordering the destruction of the structures. Administrators also ignored harassment against Jewish students and their allies by pro-Israel agitators. At Northwestern University, for example, administrators tore down students’ Gaza solidarity sukkah not once, but twice — destroying it a second time after students rebuilt the structure.

      Isabelle Butera, a student who took part in the sukkah demonstration at Northwestern, condemned the university’s actions; Northwestern has spent all year claiming to care about the wellbeing of Jewish students, yet they send police to dismantle our sacred Sukkah in the dark of night. This reveals that Northwestern’s claims of caring for Jewish students were really only about punishing any students who speak out for Palestinian freedom. Because we dedicated our Sukkot to the people of Gaza who are currently enduring genocide, Northwestern decided to send in police to harass us.”

     JVP also noted actions against students elsewhere.

     Seventeen students from Brown University are reportedly set to face disciplinary action for violating a newly enacted rule against sleeping overnight on campus property, a standard that was enacted in response to the pro-Palestinian student encampments across the country earlier this year. The university barred students from being inside their sukkah or even within 20 feet of it from the hours of 2 am and 6 am, an unprecedented action that went against the university’s tolerance of Sukkot observations in the past.

     “Every year on this campus Jewish students sleep in sukkahs without incident. We believe we are being treated differently because we…are standing with Palestine,” said Etta Robb, a student taking part in the Gaza solidarity sukkah at Brown.

     At UCLA, police in riot gear stood near a sukkah and did nothing while right-wing agitators, many who had just attended an event featuring far right speaker Ben Shapiro, harassed pro-Palestine students. The agitators shouted at the demonstrators, used homophobic slurs, and tore parts of the sukkah apart for around half an hour, forcing students taking part in the sukkah to leave out of fear for their safety.

     “The students were ultimately forced to abandon the sukkah and disperse for their safety. Only then did cops issue a dispersal order, but allowed agitators to remain and destroy the walls and decorations in the sukkah,” a press release from students said.

     Shortly afterward, maintenance workers from the university destroyed the sukkah.

     A spokesperson for JVP decried the universities’ actions against student demonstrators.

     “These universities desecrate these student’s Jewish practice because their faith is intertwined with their solidarity with the Palestinian people,” said JVP media coordinator Liv Kunins-Berkowitz. “A university has no right to dictate what types of Jewish practice are legitimate. Anti-Zionist Judaism is a longstanding and rapidly growing expression of being Jewish.”

     As written in an article as Sukkot began, also by Chris Walker in Truthout, entitled Jewish Students Mark Sukkot Holiday With Calls to End Israel’s Genocide in Gaza; “Several Jewish-led student groups are marking the holiday of Sukkot on campuses across the country by constructing small, temporary structures called sukkahs and adorning them with messages of solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s genocide.

     Sukkot, sometimes known as the Feast of Booths, is a weeklong Jewish holiday commemorating the story of the 40 years that Israelites spent in the wilderness after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt. Jewish people often celebrate Sukkot by constructing sukkahs, which are reminiscent of the shelters their ancestors lived in during displacement.

     Sukkot began at sunset on Wednesday, and will last through this coming Wednesday, October 23.

     Jewish students at campuses across the U.S. are using the occasion to call for their institutions to divest from Israel and for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel — with many noting that the holiday has increased resonance this year as millions of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced and now live in tents due to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.

     Around 18 college chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have set up sukkahs at colleges and universities across the country. Other Jewish students and groups have also taken part in the demonstrations.

     Many of the sukkahs feature both Jewish and Palestinian imagery, including olive trees. The structures are also marked with messages like “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” and “Stop Arming Israel.” At the sukkahs, students have hosted teach-ins featuring university faculty, JVP said in a press release shared with Truthout.

    The construction of sukkahs on university campuses has been met with varying responses from administrators.

     At Brown University, for example, the student group Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) received permit approval for the temporary construction of their sukkah, with the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life allowing it to stand during the weeklong holiday.

     Still, leaders from JFCN said that university officials must do more to address U.S. complicity in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

    “It is important to take up space on this campus and show that the undemocratic Corporation” — the formal name given to the governing body of Brown University — “will not silence the student movement,” Rafi Ash, a member of JFCN, told The Brown Daily Herald. “We want to show the Corporation that as they arrive on campus, they are working against the student body.”

     Not all universities were receptive to the construction of sukkahs on their grounds. Northwestern University, for example, ordered employees, accompanied by police, to tear down students’ Gaza solidarity sukkah.

     As the religious structure was being torn down, the Northwestern students who had constructed it read a poem out loud, observing the symbolism of the university destroying their sukkah that was calling for Palestinian liberation.

     “We asked if we could stay on this lawn, as we are students of this campus and have every right to be here. So we stayed and watched the police tear down the beautiful structure that we built only hours ago,” student Isabelle Butera said.

     At the University of California-Berkeley, administrators ordered another sukkah to be torn down. Jewish students condemned the action, with some saying it demonstrated the university-wide sentiment against anti-Zionist Jews on campus.

     The students relocated their sukkah to a different location, where a guest lecturer spoke. However, the next morning, the university called the police and again tore the structure down, removing materials from it, including items donated by community farms.

     “They don’t see us as real Jews or make claims that we’re self hating Jews because we refuse to support a genocide and the colonization of Indigenous Palestinians,” said Gus, who participated in building the sukkah at Berkeley. “Then, when we try to make our own space on the campus that we pay for, our administration destroys our religious dwelling not once, but twice. Both times accompanied by a swarm of police.”

     “At Brown, we are unequivocally in solidarity with Northwestern, Cornell, Columbia, and all other Jewish and non-Jewish organizers who are facing repression for pro-Palestinian activism, whether right now in their sukkahs, on their campuses, or throughout the entirety of the past year,” Eden Fine, a participant in the Sukkot event and a senior at Brown University, said in a statement to Truthout.

     A pro-Palestinian sukkah was also torn down by officials at the University of Washington.”

      What are the students protesting? As written by Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Abubaker Abed in a newsletter entitled The Murderous Logistics of Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Northern Gaza: Eyewitnesses say the IDF is starving residents, targeting hospitals, bombing shelters, and murdering civilians in the streets; “On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif posted a photograph from northern Gaza capturing the Israeli military’s brutal depopulation campaign. In the photo, hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children crowd together on a bombed-out street, carrying their few belongings in plastic bags. They all face the same direction, as if moving in procession, holding their ID cards up in the air to an Israeli soldier just out of view. The caption reads: “Ethnic Cleansing in Jabaliya 2024.”

     For the past 19 days, the Israeli military has waged a concentrated campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, according to medical staff and eyewitnesses who have been speaking to Drop Site News. The IDF has besieged the area with troops, blocked roads, and constructed earthen barriers, while cutting off access to food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. From the air, it has targeted homes, shelters, schools and hospitals with relentless airstrikes. Quadcopters are shooting civilians in the streets. Amid shelling and demolitions on the ground, soldiers have rounded up residents, arresting hundreds and forcing tens of thousands to march south. “This is the first time since the beginning of the war that the occupation army has besieged an area and then begun a campaign of bombing, killing and starvation in such a complete way,” Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for the Civil Defense in Gaza, told the Palestinian press agency Safa.

     In one of the deadliest incidents, at least 87 people were killed or have been reported missing following an airstrike on a residential block in Beit Lahia on Saturday. More than 40 people were injured in the strike, including infants, some of whom were taken to Kamal Adwan hospital. Video shared by the ministry of health shows several children barely clinging to life in the hospital’s intensive care unit, including footage of a months-old baby lying dead next to another severely wounded child covered in gauze and hooked up to tubes receiving treatment.

     On Monday, at least 10 people were killed and 30 injured in the shelling of an UNRWA school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the Jabaliya camp after the Israeli military ordered them to evacuate. In Beit Lahia on Tuesday, 15 people were killed in an Israeli drone strike, followed by a tank shelling on a school that had become a shelter for the displaced, killing seven.

     The Israeli military on Wednesday released aerial footage showing crowds streaming out of a bombed out landscape and extolling the “tens of thousands” of citizens that have been forced to flee Jabaliya. Al Jazeera also posted footage from Israel’s national broadcaster showing IDF trucks carrying dozens of blindfolded Palestinian men reportedly from Jabaliya.

     So far, the assault has claimed the lives of over 770 people, a number certain to go up with countless more casualties lying in the streets and under the rubble in areas Israeli troops have barred emergency crews from accessing. “Israeli forces are executing people in the streets, in shelters, everywhere,” Ismail Al-Thwabta, the spokesperson for the Information Ministry in Gaza, told Drop Site News. Over 1,000 others have been injured and more than 200 civilians have been “kidnapped,” according to the Government Media Office in Gaza, with dozens more missing.

     The focus of the military campaign is the northernmost governorate in the Gaza Strip, an area known as North Gaza. The stretch, where some 200,000 Palestinians still remain, includes the cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabaliya, along with Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

     The UN Human Rights Office issued a statement on Sunday voicing its concern that Israeli forces in North Gaza are interfering with humanitarian aid and facilitating the forced expulsion of Palestinians. “The Israeli military has taken measures that make life in north Gaza impossible for Palestinians while repeatedly ordering the displacement of the entire governorate,” the office said. Thousands of homes, shelters and other structures have also been destroyed “causing massive and unprecedented destruction,” the Government Media Office in Gaza said in a statement.

     Images and video shared by journalists on the ground show large groups of civilians on the street being rounded up, with Israeli tanks positioned next to them. On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat posted on X that Israeli forces that day had attacked a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, forcing people out. “Then they lined them up and shot anyone who dared to move. Any male over the age of 16 is being detained, tortured, and investigated,” he wrote. “Many people who are being lined up are sick individuals, such as amputees, cancer patients, and young kids who are being asked to stand in line for hours. The situation is catastrophic.”

     As Israeli operations in the north have intensified, its planes are dropping flyers over the area and deploying drones fitted with loudspeakers, warning people that the area will be detonated while they are inside their homes if they do not evacuate immediately. Israeli troops have also bombed and burned down shelters for the displaced.

     Amid the carnage, those who have been forced out describe a hellish journey south, made to walk for many kilometers past Israeli tanks and troops.

     Fadi Redwan, a 22-year-old resident of Jabaliya refugee camp, was forced to leave his family on October 8 and head to Kamal Adwan hospital for a blood transfusion to treat his thalassemia, a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin levels. “On my way, the streets were a picture of horror and trauma: decomposing bodies gnawed by dogs, children’s skulls here and there, scattered skeletons amid the rubble of homes. I couldn’t do anything as snipers and quadcopters were shooting everyone,” Redwan told Drop Site News. Not long after he reached the hospital, Israeli soldiers encircled and stormed the facility. “They checked my ID, my medical report, and my phone,” Redwan said. “They only gave back my ID and medical report and ordered me and five others like me with thalassemia to head to the south.”

     With Apache helicopters overhead, Redwan and several others also seeking care were forced to leave the hospital. “The streets were filled with corpses and piles of rubble and it was difficult to walk straight. Anyone looking left or right was shot dead,” he said. “There were many decomposing bodies and the smell was utterly horrific.” After a 10-hour trek, he reached the Netzarim corridor, a securitized stretch of land established by the Israeli military with bases and checkpoints that divides northern and southern Gaza, where soldiers eventually allowed him to pass through.

     Sixteen hours after Redwan was forced out of the hospital, he finally reached Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are crowded into tents on every street with little sanitation or infrastructure, taking refuge with a friend in a tent. “My family was extremely worried about me. When I finally called them, they broke down in tears as they thought I had been killed. I am now a patient and have nothing with me. I was trembling with cold yesterday as I only have this T-shirt,” Redwan said. “It was the first time I had seen Israeli soldiers—it was the shock of a lifetime. I am now without my family. I dream of having the most basic things, such as clothes to get warm and some food to eat. I don’t know how I’ll endure this, but I hope it’ll end and I’ll be back with my family. I am severely traumatized.”

     Key to Israel’s campaign in the north has been the targeting of hospitals, Al-Thwabta told Drop Site News. Following repeated attacks, the three partially functioning hospitals in the area—Kamal Adwan, Indonesian, and al-Awda—are almost out of service. Over 350 patients are trapped inside the three hospitals, including pregnant women and people who recently  underwent surgery, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.

     “Israeli attacks hit Kamal Adwan Hospital today, which remains under Israel’s constant bombings and with no medical aid or supplies,” Al-Thwabta said. “We’ve been calling out the world to allow safe corridors to provide the north with the basic necessities. However, there’s been no response. Even our request to provide healthcare professionals with food was rejected.”

     Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the hospital has run out of blood and a number of wounded have died as a result of the severe lack of resources. “We are now implementing a priority treatment system. This is the reality,” he said. Dr. Eid Sabah, the Director of Nursing at Kamal Adwan Hospital said in an audio message shared with Drop Site that Israeli forces have shelled and closed all roads and streets leading to the hospital, preventing ambulances from reaching the facility, effectively isolating it.

     At the Indonesian hospital, “the occupation bombs the generators, cutting off electricity, causing patients to die after being disconnected from oxygen devices,” Dr. Munir Al-Borsh, director-general of the ministry of health, said in a statement. “Doctors and medical staff dig graves to bury the martyrs inside the hospital, which is besieged by tanks, as they are unable to leave.”

     And at the Al-Awda Hospital, Israeli forces “have completely surrounded the hospital, and we cannot leave or approach the windows,” Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of the hospital, said in a message. “We only eat one meal a day, which is half a loaf of bread or a small plate of rice. Two days ago, occupation forces fired artillery shells at the hospital, destroying two floors of patients’ accommodation and water tanks.”

     With Israel continuing to enforce a near-total blockade the humanitarian crisis is becoming catastrophic. On Monday, Israeli forces killed six men in the Jabaliya refugee camp attempting to get drinking water, Al Jazeera reported. Also on Monday, the UN said Israel had, for the fourth consecutive day, denied an urgent request it had made to allow access to the Jabaliya refugee camp to rescue people trapped under the rubble. Israel also denied a separate request by the UN to deliver food, water, and fuel. Farhan Haq, the UN’s deputy spokesman, said Israel also denied 28 UN requests to deliver humanitarian aid to Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahiya between October 6 and 20. Several other requests, he added, “faced impediments.”

     On Tuesday, the Israeli military said in a statement that over 230 trucks carrying aid have entered northern Gaza since last week, despite multiple reports from journalists on the ground and humanitarian organizations pushing back on that claim, including the World Health Organization. The group said on Wednesday that when teams were granted access to Kamal Adwan Hospital to evacuate critical patients, their request to bring food, fuel, blood, and medicine was denied.

     In a letter addressed to senior Israeli officials dated October 13, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel must take steps in the next month to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face potential restrictions on military aid. Yet at the same time, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby stressed in a press briefing that the letter was intended not as a threat, but as a way to “reiterate the sense of urgency we feel and the seriousness with which we feel it, about the need for an increase, a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance.”

     Phillippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, posted an urgent message on X on Tuesday:

     “Nearly three weeks of non-stop bombardments from the Israeli Forces as the death toll increases.

     Our staff report they cannot find food, water or medical care.

     The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied.

     In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.

     They feel deserted, hopeless and alone. They live from one hour to the next, fearing death at every second.”

     And while university systems and other authorities in America perpetrate repression of dissent which echoes and reflects the McCarthy era and the gruesome police brutality unleashed on peace activists during the Vietnam War, our colony and client state of Israel bombs hospitals and schools while our leaders betray us and abandon our ideals of universal human rights as our taxes buy the deaths of children.

      But there is nothing new in this museum of Holocausts Israel and America have together made of the Holy Land as imperial conquest and dominion, nor in the complicity of our universities and elites in profiteering from terror.

     As I wrote in my post of May 15 2024, Anniversary of Bloody Thursday Berkeley 1969: Love, Magic, and Political Awakening Amid the Most Massive and Terrible Incident of Police Terror in American History; In this time of melting glaciers and dying seas, of drought and scarcity of drinking water, of burning rainforests and species extinctions, of acid rain and clouds of poison gas, of humankind drowning in our own wastes of greed and vanity and taking everything else with us, of fascist tyranny and state terror, of the horrors of imperial conquest and wars of dominion which threaten us with nuclear annihilation, I find myself reflecting not on the inevitability of our failure but instead on the hope of our defiance of those who would sell us into oblivion.

     And so I write to offer you a fragment of protective magic from my childhood and family history; but first the truth of the peril and existential crisis we face today.

     As I wrote of biodiversity and extinction in my post of May 13 2019; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.

     How shall we answer this nothingness?  Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?

     Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?

     We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be Lightbringers, or we will annihilate ourselves.

      So I wrote among my celebrations of May Day and the coming of spring. I write today not to prophecy apocalypse, but to hold before us hope of redemption. Of Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal, of the abolition of police and carceral states, and of solidarity which bridges authorized identities and divisions in seizures of power and revolutionary struggle against those who would enslave us I have written much and will do so again; but I promised magic, and you shall have it.

     As recounted in Lions Roar; ‘In 1969, poet Gary Snyder wrote his “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” imagining Smokey as the Great Sun Buddha giving a discourse, in the style of a Buddhist sutra. Fifty years later, the message of the sutra continues to resonate.”

      I first heard it, a song of shining truth and the incorruptible redemptive power of love, sung by my mother and the women who joined hands in a circle of protection between the protestors holding signs and flowers and the guns of the riot police during the summer of my Awakening to political awareness.

     Gary Snyder had distributed copies of his poem at the February 1969 Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, which were in the hands of the protesters who occupied People’s Park in Berkeley to rally in support of the people of Palestine and demand divestiture of investment in Israeli injustices by the University of California system and our government, just in time for Bloody Thursday on May 15, when his words were the only shield against the shotgun blasts- lethal rounds with multiple shot the size of 38 caliber bullets which had been loaded with intent to kill- fired at random into the crowd by the police.

      Of the six thousand protesters at the scene of what has been called the most violent incident of state terror in American history, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.

     I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. Is it truly so threatening, a bouquet of flowers, to our systems of unequal power, to patriarchy, to white supremacy, to capitalism, to the carceral state? I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, like God’s head being split open with a hammer, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.

     The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.

     The force wave of the detonations cast my consciousness from my body, like the shadows etched on the walls of Hiroshima, momentarily dead and in a vision of our possible alternate futures become a vessel of fate, bearer of a terrible awareness that we live on the cusp of decision of an age of tyranny, six to eight centuries of fascist and theocratic prison-states, wars and genocides, ending with the extinction of humankind.

     I returned from death in my mother’s arms, and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”

     This is why I have learned to read our futures in current events as civilizational choices we make, as adaptations to threats and to change, through the methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy; because ours is a time of Rashomon Gate Events which can doom or save us, for our actions have consequences globally and for all of us, and if we are to escape the fall of civilization and our extinction we must reimagine and transform ourselves.

     What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”

     In all of this, I remembered the great spell of love and nonviolence which heralded my Awakening and may have saved the lives of my mother and myself among others.

     As to family history and the origins of Smokey the Bear as a protective spirit,  my aunt Betty invented Smokey the Bear as a character to represent our duty of stewardship of nature during her career in the U.S. Forest Service, named for an actual bear cub raised by herself among other forest rangers and Native Americans together because its mother had died in a forest fire. As the USFS mascot and spokesman, he became the image of one of most successful marketing campaigns in history and a universal symbol which belongs to us all.

     I hope that he will continue to protect all of us and our planet, and to remind us to live in harmony with each other and our fellow beings as companions on a great journey. So, here follows the Smokey the Bear Sutra:

     “Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

 “In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”

“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of great volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form: to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger; and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”

And he showed himself in his true form of

SMOKEY THE BEAR.

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attach­ments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display—indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but only destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharrna and the True Path of man on earth: all true paths lead through mountains—

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the Kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned food, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but Calm, Austere but Comic, Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him,

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

“I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED”

And he will protect those who love woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children;

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel,

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada,

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick,

Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature,

Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts

Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine to sit at,

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.

thus have we heard.”

     A sovereign and independent Palestine, as imagined by its people only, with the UN as guarantor; for this dream I have struggled for fifty five years now since my first death, of moments only, from the concussive pressure wave of a police grenade when I was nine as Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the student divestiture from Israel protests, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley; and as my consciousness was hurled out of my body I stood beyond time and lived myriads of possible futures extending through millennia.

      I hope that we choose love over fear, power, and force, now in this moment when the fate of humankind balances between liberty and tyranny, and that we are not still merely hoping that solidarity may one day triumph over division fifty years from now, or fifty thousand, but now begin its realization, here in this Holocaust which is Gaza.

      May peace be upon us all.

Postscript: On Solidarity and liberation struggle, regarding the charge of protest against Israeli genocide being the same as support for Hamas

      Traitor Trump has attempted to deport a Palestinian student leader of liberation struggle under the false charges of antisemitism and the bizarre characterization of the anti-genocide protests as being pro Hamas, a government on America’s official list of terrorist organizations which has mysteriously excluded Israel.

     Protest for our universal human rights has nothing to do with Hamas, other than the inconvenient fact that Hamas is also fighting for human rights in Palestine, including the right to live and the right of civilians to be free from war crimes perpetrated against them.

     This leaves us with the question, why would anyone support Hamas, or align themselves with any defender of the people against Occupation and imperial conquest and dominion by a hostile power? It is exactly the same question we must ask of Ukraine in her magnificent stand for liberty against Russia.

     You must understand that Hamas recruits ten fighters for each killed, is recognized as the legitimate state of Palestine by the Palestinians because no one else fights for them in quite the same way, and will never submit. Not in a thousand years.

      Nor do they stand alone; I will stand with them and with any who stand between forces of genocide, ethnic cleansing, imperial conquest and dominion, tyranny and terror and their intended victims. The particulars are irrelevant. Nor do I recognize differences of blood, faith, or national identity as just causes of war, which is to say that I am an antifascist and believe in the absolute and universal equality of all human beings.

      I place my life in the balance with the powerless and the dispossessed, the marginalized and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, and I will bet my refusal to submit to tyranny and terror against any power on earth.

     Join us.

Wednesday’s concert to the night

Nothing Else Matters, by Apocalyptica from the original Metallica song, as featured on the Netflix series Wednesday

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=apocalyptica+nothing+else+matters&&mid=AA266605DF9D958B4054AA266605DF9D958B4054&&FORM=VRDGAR

“I don’t believe in heaven or hell. But I do believe in vengeance.”

Reproduced from the Summer 1970 issue of Wind Bell, where it appeared with the note, “May be reproduced free forever.”

https://www.lionsroar.com/smokey-the-bear-sutra/?mc_cid=25ada9ff7b&mc_eid=ac72415e66

‘Reeks of McCarthyism’: outrage after Ice detains Palestinian student activist

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/10/palestinian-activist-mahmoud-khalil-reactions?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2oRXXiIAgwJ6IQToPdpJTmRTnIsbe5xYqXLO1rchm3mtcrTYSle9kaG4M_aem_3YtBoA7FWXOeLSjskJ_wdw

Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment should not happen in a democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/11/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-ice-columbia?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0zy80p7ukKvyf-WdRBEYAUXO93cKDHcfq91s6FnSTNuAwQ7DV0kfVuI90_aem_AjnZhrAXMwLqTY5JhjWXcA

Trump Is Viciously Cracking Down on Free Speech

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/trump-free-speech-khalil-deportation?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3MHcLCUMu_RPTcZUr8AzDIYOXFePschSSr3ZT66utVBjTCclZTpvbF2xo_aem_8FhTQyXbjI6NGZZM0Z-2pA

Pro-Palestine Protesters Are on the Right Side of History

https://jacobin.com/2024/04/columbia-university-palestine-protests-1968

The Gaza Massacre Is Undermining the Culture of Democracy

https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-genocide-holocaust-memory-democracy

What To Know About Mahmoud Khalil, and Why His Green Card Was Revoked

https://time.com/7266683/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-green-card/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0w046ufB5CrXIpSXjuFMFKZmdIlCL6U_w90Kp6Rqw28-Y4TJ0uJ0Ng73U_aem_8LGzXRQ5RIbhiK7bMLTBmw

‘Do not bow’: ex-Black Panther praises pro-Palestinian student protesters from prison

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/28/pro-palestinian-cuny-protesters-mumia-abu-jamal

Jewish Students Blast Universities for Actions Against Sukkot Demonstrations

Universities destroyed sukkah shelters and stood by while students were harassed by bigots, Jewish Voice for Peace said.

https://truthout.org/articles/jewish-students-blast-universities-for-actions-against-sukkot-demonstrations/?utm_source=feedotter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FO-10-24-2024&utm_content=httpstruthoutorgarticlesjewishstudentsblastuniversitiesforactionsagainstsukkotdemonstrations&utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=9ece4459fb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_10_24_08_53&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-9ece4459fb-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

The Murderous Logistics of Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Northern Gaza: Eyewitnesses say the IDF is starving residents, targeting hospitals, bombing shelters, and murdering civilians in the streets

https://open.substack.com/pub/dropsitenews/p/israel-north-gaza-hospital-eyewitness-palestine-united-nations?r=7ed07&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Students across Europe hold Gaza war protests in run-up to UN vote on Palestinian statehood

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/09/students-europe-gaza-war-protests-un-vote-palestinian-statehood?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2dXZnvAs7ddf62_OhKCwKt46AQBzJHI0g_P4bz5UJV3hUt-RubFF3Fcnk_aem_AXa2tuLjnQQIufllLLmKBoUOH9wF7aeJzj5vtPufYE5hQl55R8U3L4Bh7Xp9qVRlmoz2VUuHzM1WdS4qp7aoXWTV

 More than 2,000 pro-Palestinian protesters arrested across US campuses

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/02/university-protests-arrests-ucla-dartmouth

                   Bloody Thursday, a reading list

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/06/the-battle-for-peoples-park-berkeley-1969-review-vietnam

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/flashback-ronald-reagan-and-the-berkeley-peoples-park-riots-114873/

https://www.rt.com/usa/343123-reagan-berkeley-park-riot

https://archive.org/details/canhpra_000027

Berkeley’s People’s Park was born 50 years ago today

Photographer’s images capture point when People’s Park protests turned deadly 50 years ago

Power to the People – People’s Park – Berkeley- 1969

Bloody Thursday: how People’s Park became a battleground