We may be witnessing the ongoing destruction of one of the greatest pillars of postwar American global influence and hegemony.
Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.
A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.
Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.
ICE arrested Tufts graduate Rumeysa Ozturk a year after she co-authored a pro-Palestinian op-ed and was flagged for anti-Israel activism.
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— AF Post (@AFpost) March 26, 2025
That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.
Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.
CBS News covered a local protest demonstration demanding the young woman’s release, and quoted the remarks of one of the participants:
“The university campus should absolutely be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas and the fact that someone can just be disappeared into the abyss for voicing an idea is absolutely horrifying,” said rally attendee Sam Wachman.
Now supposed that such a scene—for such a reason—had taken place on the streets of Russia, China, Iran, or any other country viewed with great disfavor by our government. Surely that incident would have quickly become the centerpiece of a massive global propaganda offensive aimed at blackening the reputation of the regime responsible. Audiences worldwide would have been forcefully told that the arrest demonstrated the terrible dangers of living in a society lacking the freedoms guaranteed by our own Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I don’t recall seeing any recent propaganda campaigns along these lines, so that suggests that such incidents are extremely rare in those countries.
But unfortunately that is hardly the case in today’s America. A day or two before that Tufts graduate student was snatched off the streets of her city, a 21-year-old Columbia University junior went into hiding to avoid a similar fate after federal agents raided her campus dorm to arrest her. As the Times reported, high school valedictorian Yunseo Chung had moved to the U.S. with her family from South Korea when she was 7, but her permanent residency was suddenly revoked for her public criticism of Israeli policy. She was ordered immediately deported back to a country that she barely even remembered.
This followed the storm of controversy unleashed earlier this month by the very high profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate student heavily involved in last year’s campus protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Seized in an early morning raid on his campus student housing, which he shared with his wife, an American citizen eight months pregnant, he was taken off to detention, first in New Jersey and then transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana, once again with no initial access to his family, friends, or lawyers.
As a Green Card holder—a permanent legal resident of the U.S.—he was considered fully entitled to all the normal rights and privileges of an American citizen, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that his Green Card would be canceled and he would be deported based upon an obscure legal doctrine never previously employed for that purpose, eliciting a strong legal challenge in federal court. Moreover, his transfer from a New Jersey jurisdiction to a different one in the Deep South also seemed to violate normal legal procedures.
A week after that arrest, Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia doctoral candidate from India on a Fulbright Scholarship, hurriedly packed her bags and fled the country to Canada when she narrowly missed being arrested by federal authorities who raided her student housing. As the New York Times reported:
“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”
A day earlier Rubio explained that he had already authorized the arrest and immediate deportation of more than 300 students around the country for their criticism of Israel, so these particular cases obviously represented merely the tip of a very large iceberg.
In past decades, the academic leadership of a top Ivy League school such as Columbia might have stoutly defended the students in its community. But any such resistance was broken when the Trump Administration suddenly pulled $400 million in annual funding. The demands included full cooperation with the arrest of any students critical of Israeli policies, the creation of a new internal security force to suppress any anti-Israel campus protests, and “receivership” for the university’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Program, presumably resulting in firm Zionist control.
Acting President Katrina Armstrong bowed to those demands, sacrificing the academic freedom of her faculty members and the personal freedom of her students. But faced with such enormous conflicting pressures, she then resigned on Friday evening, some seven months after her predecessor had resigned for roughly similar reasons.
That same day newspapers also reported that the top leadership of Harvard University’s equally prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Center had been dismissed, probably ensuring that after more than seventy years this independent academic organization would henceforth become firmly pro-Israel in its orientation. Last year, after Harvard’s previous president had strongly defended academic freedom before a hostile Congressional committee, she was quickly forced to resign.
As I casually examined the home page of the New York Times website on Saturday, I noticed five different articles reporting these striking blows to intellectual freedom at a number of our top American universities, and it’s quite possible that I may have missed one or two others.
For the last several generations, America’s elite academic institutions have been among the most prestigious in the world, drawing top students from across the globe and constituting a central pillar of our country’s soft power. Until last year, no previous case came to mind of an Ivy League president having been abruptly removed for political reasons. But over the last twelve months, four or five different Ivy League presidents have suffered that fate.
Similarly, I had never heard of any previous cases of peaceful college students being arrested by teams of masked federal officers, either seized from their dorm rooms in sudden raids or snatched off the streets of their local city.
Consider an ironic historical comparison. During the early 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed for their involvement in a Soviet spy-ring that gave our nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin. But as far as I know their arrest was handled in a very subdued fashion, with merely a couple of FBI agents quietly taking them into federal custody despite the capital charges that they faced. So apparently public criticism of Israel is today regarded as a far more serious and dangerous offense than nuclear espionage had been at the absolute height of the Cold War.
Indeed, the closest historical example that comes to mind were the notorious Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920, which led to the deportation of several hundred immigrants. But these round-ups occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and waves of terrorist bombing attacks across many American cities, with Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer narrowly surviving two separate assassination attempts, including a bombing that destroyed his own Washington, DC home. Meanwhile, most of the immigrants arrested and deported were relatively recent arrivals, generally anarchist or Bolshevik radicals who had declared their intent to overthrow the American government.
Perhaps there have been previous examples of college students arrested merely for writing campus newspaper op-eds advocating peaceful and perfectly legal positions. But I don’t recall reading of any such egregious cases in my introductory history textbooks so I tend to doubt it.
One rather strange aspect of the current situation is that no students seem to have been arrested for voicing public criticism of the American government or even President Donald Trump. Only criticism of the Jewish State of Israel or Jews themselves seems to provoke such severe legal repression. This brings to mind a very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire:
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Since World War II elite American universities have tended to attract the best and the brightest young men and women from around the world, thereby shaping the minds of so many future global leaders. So I suspect that these shocking news stories of harsh ideological crackdowns on academic freedom and sudden dramatic arrests by masked federal agents are already reverberating around the world, severely damaging one of the few remaining pillars of American geopolitical dominance.
Perhaps only small numbers of ordinary Americans have been following the sudden, desperate plight of these top students from Turkey, South Korea, or India, but I think that a very large fraction of the educated elites of those important American allies are fully aware of what has transpired, and they are utterly horrified.
Under the control of its pro-Israel masters, the leading figures of the Trump Administration seem determined to severely wound or actually destroy the foremost institutions of our globally-dominant system of higher education.
Indeed, even before the latest round of these striking incidents, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had declared that the Israel Lobby posed the greatest threat to American freedom of speech, with his views strongly seconded by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and also former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi:
Although I was deeply shocked by these harsh Trump Administration attacks against freedom of speech and academic freedom, perhaps I should not have been. In many respects, they merely extended what had already occurred last year under his equally pro-Israel Democratic predecessor President Joseph Biden, as I had covered at the time in numerous articles.
