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When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi
figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da
qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so
called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali.
Al Jazeera - Feb 4 2025 - By Al Jazeera Staff
<<Advocates warn Trump’s threat to deport pro-Palestine students harms
all
Critics say Trump’s attempt to combat anti-Semitism on campus promotes
fear and repression among immigrants.
Independent student workers supporting Palestinians hold a march at the
main campus as protests continue at Columbia University
New York, United States – Last week, United States President Donald
Trump published a message directed at the student protesters who
participated in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations. It was a
warning. And it was aimed specifically at the immigrants among the
protesters.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we
put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,”
Trump was quoted as saying in a White House fact sheet. “I will also
quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college
campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
The statement was the latest sign that the fallout from the protests was
far from over. If anything, under Trump’s second term, free-speech
advocates and Palestinian rights supporters are bracing for a continued
crackdown on the university activists who led demonstrations. “The legal
questions about deporting students for speech that would otherwise be
protected in the US are complicated,” Sarah McLaughlin, a scholar at the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Al Jazeera.
“But the ethical question is clear: Do we want deportation to be a
consequence for expressing political views disfavoured by the White
House?”
A plan to ‘remove’ foreign students
Trump’s statements came on the heels of a new executive order, signed on
January 29. It paved the way for the deportation of foreign students in
the name of combatting anti-Semitism on campus. The order pledges
“immediate action” to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account
the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence”. To
achieve that goal, it calls on the secretary of education to provide an
inventory of court cases involving anti-Semitism at colleges,
universities and schools teaching kindergarten through 12th grade. The
order also requires all higher education establishments to be instructed
on how to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and
staff” that are relevant to the anti-Semitism push. If warranted, the
government can then initiate “actions to remove such aliens”. The order
comes in response to what the Trump administration calls an “explosion
of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7,
2023”. On that day, fighters from the Palestinian armed group Hamas
attacked southern Israel, killing an estimated 1,139 people. Israel
responded with war. For 15 months, Israeli bombs fell on the Palestinian
enclave of Gaza, as its troops levelled hospitals, schools and
neighbourhoods. Now that a fragile ceasefire has taken hold, officials
hope to get a more accurate picture of the death toll, which currently
sits at 62,000, many of the dead being Palestinian women and children.
United Nations experts have compared Israel’s warfare methods with
genocide, and concerns about human rights prompted thousands of students
at colleges and universities to rally in protest. Some set up
encampments to denounce Israel’s actions. Others picketed to demand
their universities divest from Israeli businesses and other companies
that supported the war. But while the protests were largely peaceful,
some expressed discomfort with the public criticisms of Israel, a key US
ally. Others accused the demonstrators of anti-Semitism, though protest
leaders have denied such allegations. Under pressure from donors and
legislators, many universities cracked down on pro-Palestine activities
on campuses. As many as 3,000 student protesters were arrested at the
height of the protest movement in 2024.
‘Censors and snitches’
In the meantime, questions of anti-Semitism in the protest movement
reached the highest levels of government, with then-President Joe Biden
pledging to take action. The movement also unfolded against the backdrop
of a heated US presidential election season, and Trump used the issue as
part of his campaign. The Washington Post reported in May that he told
donors he would take student protesters and “throw them out of the
country”. Later, in July, Republicans published a party platform that
reflected similar rhetoric. One of its promises was to “deport pro-Hamas
radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”. Trump
even threatened to pull funding and accreditation from universities that
failed to sufficiently tamp down on the protesters. Dima Khalidi — the
director of Palestine Legal, a group protecting the rights of Palestine
advocates in the US — called Trump’s order last week “the latest in a
growing list of dangerous, authoritarian measures aimed at enforcing an
ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students
into silence”. She believes Trump’s order violates the First Amendment
of the US Constitution, which protects free speech and the right to
assembly. And she argues that the danger stretches further than the
recent pro-Palestinian movement. “The implications of this executive
order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi said. “It
encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from
Trump’s agenda and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors
and snitches.”
Free-speech questions
Like other executive actions Trump rushed to sign during the first days
of his second term, the January 29 order is expected to face legal
challenges.
Carrie DeCell, a senior staff lawyer at the Knight First Amendment
Institute at Columbia University, explained that First Amendment
protections apply to “everyone in the United States”, regardless of
citizenship or visa status. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of
their political speech would be unconstitutional,” she wrote in a
statement. However, McLaughlin, the free speech advocate, pointed out
that the federal government still “retains significant authority over
the presence of foreign nationals in the country”. That could result in
a chilling effect: silencing vulnerable student protesters who rely on
visas or other immigration documents to stay in the US. “This order,
coupled with President Trump’s accompanying threat to deport what he
deems ‘Hamas sympathisers’, will suggest to international students that
the rights promised on our nation’s campuses are not theirs to enjoy,”
McLaughlin said. “This is a loss for these students, whose speech will
likely be chilled, and for their peers, who will be deprived of the
ability to hear, engage with, and challenge those views.” In a statement
for the free-speech organisation PEN America, Kristen Shahverdian said
Trump’s order was “reminiscent of McCarthyism”, a period in history when
the US government sought to root out and ostracise people deemed
“subversive”. “While the stated goal of this executive order is
combating anti-Semitism, instead it significantly risks creating an
authoritarian-like army of informers who will be empowered to target
international students, faculty and staff for their views,” she
explained. “This order will do little to further dialogue and
understanding on campus, or combat bigotry. Rather, it will further
worsen a climate of fear and mistrust.”
Combating anti-Semitism
Not only does the executive order raise issues of free speech, but
critics also questioned whether Trump’s directive would actually achieve
its stated aim of combatting anti-Semitism. In a statement, Ben Olinsky,
a fellow at the Center for American Progress, accused the Trump
administration of weaponising anti-Semitism “for political gain”. “It
does nothing to keep Jewish students or any other Americans safe from
hate or prevent terrorism, which pose legitimate threats to America’s
Jewish communities,” Olinsky wrote. “Instead, it forsakes education and
dialogue while attacking protected political speech. It’s clear that
Trump’s real goal is to silence opposing voices.” While reports of
anti-Semitism did rise over the past year, so too did incidents of
anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate. From January to July 2024, the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest
Muslim civil rights organisation, tallied 4,951 complaints, a 69 percent
increase over the same period the previous year. In the wake of Trump’s
executive order, the group denounced the fact that those incidents were
not considered at all. “The order completely ignores real and documented
incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim violence against American
college students by pro-Israel extremists,” CAIR wrote in its statement.
It also called the order an “attempt to smear the many Jewish, Muslim,
Palestinian and other college students who protested” the war together.
Other critics, like Olinksy, argued that if Trump were serious about
combatting anti-Semitism, he would distance himself from groups like the
far-right Proud Boys. “If President Trump really cared [about] the very
real rise in acts of anti-Semitism, he would start by firing Elon Musk
for making what appeared to be a Nazi salute last week,” Olinsky also
said. “President Trump’s repeated refusal to condemn anti-Semitism when
it comes from his own supporters is helping to enable the troubling rise
in anti-Semitism that we see today.”>>
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/4/advocates-warn-trumps-threat-to-deport-pro-palestine-students-harms-all
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Gino d'Artali |
Women's
Liberation Front 2019/cryfreedom.net 2025