technocrit

The Trump administration has repeatedly conflated participation in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza with support for Hamas. It has also accused demonstrators of supporting “terrorists”.

Kordia’s arrest marks the second time in less than a week that a Palestinian student at Columbia University has been taken into ICE custody for deportation. On Saturday, protest spokesperson Mahmoud Khalil likewise was arrested and placed in immigration detention, first in New Jersey and later in Louisiana.

Civil liberty advocates say the arrests are meant to stifle free speech rights, and Khalil’s lawyer this week argued he has not been able to contact his client privately, in violation of his right to legal counsel.

Khalil is a permanent resident of the US, with a green card, and his American wife is eight months pregnant. The Trump administration, however, says it plans to strip him of his green card.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in the news release.

But the arrests and student visa revocation were not the only strong-armed actions the Trump administration took against Columbia in the last 24 hours.

In a letter issued late on Thursday night, the administration demanded that Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) be placed in an “academic receivership” wherein an outside authority takes control, often as punishment for mismanagement.

The letter specified that the university must come up with a plan to create the academic receivership role no later than March 20.

Failure to comply, the letter warned, would negatively affect “Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government”.

Setting up a receivership was just one in a list of demands, which included abolishing the university’s judicial board for hearing disciplinary matters, banning masks on campus and adopting a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that some fear could limit legitimate criticisms of Israel.

President Donald Trump’s attempt to deport pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil marks one of Trump’s most egregious assaults on democratic liberties since taking office. Yet too many Democrats, particularly in party leadership, are responding to Trump in the most mealymouthed way possible. But this is a problem of Democrats’ own making: Their trepidation stems from their own history of repressing speech critical of Israel — and now we’re all at risk of paying the price for it.

President Donald Trump’s attempt to deport pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil marks one of Trump’s most egregious assaults on democratic liberties since taking office. Yet too many Democrats, particularly in party leadership, are responding to Trump in the most mealymouthed way possible. But this is a problem of Democrats’ own making: Their trepidation stems from their own history of repressing speech critical of Israel — and now we’re all at risk of paying the price for it.

On Thursday, the university announced it was expelling, suspending and revoking the degrees of 22 students following last year’s Hamilton Hall protest, fulfilling one of the nine demands issued in a letter from the Trump administration to Columbia.

The University Judicial Board (UJB) - which has been overseeing disciplinary proceedings for pro-Palestinian protestors since the fall and issued the punishments - said it was issuing “multi-year suspension, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall” on 30 April.

Previously, the UJB - an independent body of faculty, staff and students - had only suspended students. One of the demands made by the Trump administration is to eliminate the UJB and centralise discipline beneath the president’s office, giving them sole jurisdiction over punishing students.

A statement from the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition alleged that co-chair of the Board of Trustees David Greenwald - who worked at Goldman Sachs for 20 years - “was revealed to have personally interfered in the disciplinary cases of these students”.

An estimated six students were expelled from Columbia University, according to student organisers. One of the students expelled and fired was Grant Miner, president of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union.

According to the union, the expulsion occurred a day before contract negotiations were set to begin with the university on Friday. In a press release issued on Friday, they said: “Miner was expelled without any evidence after nearly a year of disciplinary proceedings.”

“The first bargaining session between SWC and Columbia begins Friday, where the Union will present demands to protect international and undocumented student workers.

"Mahmoud Khalil, a UAW card signer, was detained by the US government last week, making Miner the second SWC member to be targeted. The Union is demanding protections for international and undocumented students, which would make it more difficult for Columbia to cave to federal pressure by aiding the Department of Homeland Security in abducting student workers.”

At the time of publication, SWC said Columbia had cancelled bargaining two hours before negotiations were due to take place.

TL;DR:

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Russian President Vladimir Putin
• Former Sudanese President Omar Bashir
• Ugandan Warlord Joseph Kony
• Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
• Former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo

Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.

In mere months, entire Palestinian communities between Ramallah and Jericho have been chased out by settler violence and state policies — paving the way for a total Israeli takeover of thousands of acres of land.

The fallout highlights how geopolitical tensions and financial risks can destabilize global franchises. Reports suggest consumer boycotts targeting Western brands over Israel’s actions in Gaza significantly impacted KFC’s Turkish sales . Meanwhile, İş Gıda’s debt-fueled growth strategy left it vulnerable to economic shocks, including Turkey’s inflation crisis.

BDS works. That's why it's illegal.

...Saturday’s exchange offered a revealing view of the outsized role US corporate media play in the general dehumanization of the Palestinian people—an approach that conveniently coincides with the Middle East policy of the United States, which is predicated on the obsessive funneling of hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance and weaponry to Israel’s genocidal army. And now that President Donald Trump has decided that the US can take over Gaza by simply expelling its inhabitants, well, dehumanizing them may serve an even handier purpose.

Granted, it’s a lot easier for a news report to tell the individual stories of three people than to tell the stories of 183. But the relentless empathetic media attention to the three Israeli men—who, mind you, are not the ones currently facing a genocide—deliberately leaves little to no room for Palestinian victims of an Israeli carceral system that has for decades been characterized by illegal arbitrary detention, torture and in-custody death.

So it is that we learn the names and ages of the three Israelis, the names of their family members, and empathy-inducing details of their captivity and physical appearance, while the 183 Palestinians remain at best a side note, and at worst a largely faceless mass of newly freed terrorists...

Imagine the leader of a global superpower announcing a plan for removing an entire ethnic group from a territory they’ve long inhabited. Neighboring states would have to make land available to that superpower to resettle the displaced peoples. The refugees would “have their own administration in this territory” but they would “not acquire … citizenship” since any “sense of responsibility towards the world” would forbid making “the gift of a sovereign state” to a people “which has had no independent state for thousands of years.”

No, the plan described in brief here is not President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, proposing a United States takeover of Gaza and mass relocation of its Palestinian population. It is the so-called “Madagascar Plan,” devised by Nazi Germany in 1940 to “resettle” European Jews.

That plan was the Third Reich’s final major proposal for removing the Jews from the Greater Germanic Reich Adolf Hitler envisioned in Mein Kampf prior to the “Final Solution” — the indiscriminate shootings of Jewish men, women, and children on the Eastern Front, leading to mass killings in death camps and gas chambers in late 1941. In that history lies a warning: Plans for the mass relocation of a population seen as troublesome or dangerous can rapidly devolve into the loss of sovereignty, of human and civil rights, and, eventually, ethnic cleansing.

The Gaza government’s Detainee Media Office has issued a statement slamming what it called "international double standards" in media treatment of Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel as opposed to three Israeli captives released by Hamas in a prisoner exchange on Saturday.

Media reports on Saturday focused on the gaunt and emaciated condition of the three released captives – Eli Sharabi, 52, Eli Levy, 34, and Ohad Ben-Ami, 58.

The Israeli government said that their treatment by Hamas was "a crime against humanity", with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is himself wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, threatening that their condition would “not pass without a response”.

The Israeli health ministry said that the released captives had suffered severe malnutrition.

However, the Detainee Media Office pointed out that dozens of Palestinian detainees had died as a result of malnutrition, abuse, and medical neglect in Israeli prisons without any international condemnation or media coverage, and said that this was an example of "double standards in dealing with the prisoner issue".

It said that hundreds of released Palestinian prisoners had left Israeli prisons with permanent injuries, "broken psychologically and physically" after years of abuse and torture, without the international community taking any notice.

The Detainee Media Office said that the emaciated condition of the released Israeli captives was due to Israel’s siege and its restrictions on the entry of food into the Gaza Strip, which have affected the population of the territory as a whole, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

"Where was the outcry when [Israeli] prison cells turned into human slaughterhouses? Where was the emergency when Palestinian detainees came out of prison as shadows of their former selves, after being deprived of food, medicine, and their most basic human rights?"

While the Israeli captives released on Saturday appeared emaciated and gaunt, leading to outcry in Israel, captives released previously have appeared in better health, with no signs of malnutrition.

By contrast, Palestinians previously released by Israel have shown visible signs of starvation and severe mental and physical trauma.

183 Palestinian prisoners were released to Gaza and the West Bank in Saturday’s exchange, with at least seven being rushed to hospital as soon as they were released due to mistreatment in Israeli detention facilities.

Israel’s extreme right-wing Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has previously boasted about the "abominable" and "squalid" conditions Palestinian prisoners were kept in in Israel, saying that he had reduced food and shower times for prisoners.

Israeli right wing figures have also defended soldiers who brutally raped Palestinian detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility.

While hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have been released in exchanges with Hamas following the Gaza ceasefire, there are still over 10,000 in Israeli jails, including hundreds of children and hundreds held without charge or trial in administrative detention.