Hard Lesson
Every once in a while, after watching an event unfold, I like to ask myself, what would I have done? I did it yesterday, for instance, while reading up on the events that led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar, here on an F-1 student visa as a doctoral student, into custody and strip her of her visa. Apparently, she was picked up because she was one of four authors of an editorial piece last year in the Tufts student paper protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine.
At first blush, I thought I would have demurred from taking part in that sort of protest because as a guest in another country or in someone else’s home, I would have felt obligated to stick to my studies and not cause any trouble. Then I started to think that it was a student paper where I was in school, and isn’t this part of my education? So, what harm could it possibly cause, there are only 13,000 students at Tufts and it’s likely only a small percentage read the paper. And finally, I would have thought, this is America where they protect freedom of speech. So, I feel like I probably would have signed that article.
For a while, under the previous administration, it was an okay decision. But this administration is different. Ms Ozturk got on the radar of the government of the most powerful nation in the known world, the United States, and it was willing to marshal its resources to resolve its difficulties with her. She was arrested in Massachusetts and shipped off to Louisiana. To me, the response feels disproportionate to the supposed crime. It feels like putting a child up for adoption because they offended you. An aggressive, petty, and slightly irrational response. And of course, I now worry what they might do to me, if this piece offends them, and maybe that’s the point, create fear.