Call to resist repression: Universities must refuse cooperation with the Trump regime

from Mondoweiss

Universities are serving as staging grounds for the Trump regime’s escalation of attacks on immigrants, people of color, trans and queer people, and critics of Zionism, ranging from armed attacks including the ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to institutional attacks that withdraw, cancel, and criminalize funding and infrastructure. The demand from the Department of Education to place into receivership Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies is another escalation of these attacks. These are accompanied by the vast widening of ICE arrests and detentions.Without organized resistance and refusal to comply, history shows us that these assaults will undoubtedly expand in reach, in violence, and in the destruction of scholarly communities.

The Trump regime’s attacks on universities have been fueled by baseless smears against students, faculty, and staff propagated by Zionist groups who agitate specifically on college campuses. These include vigilante groups who have issued mass calls to their followers to report student protesters to ICE, claimed credit for inciting the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and produced names of further students and scholars to be criminalized and targeted. Their perverse and dangerous rationale for identifying scholars and students as threats is rooted in the disingenuous conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As evident with the arrest of Leqaa Kordia and visa revocation of Ranjani Srinivasan, students and faculty continue to be targeted in vastly concerning and escalating ways, for their (presumed) association with community-based and political organizing groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and local student and community organizations...

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