In writing about the Trump regime's fascist assault on foreign student anti-genocide protestors, a lot of what we talk about is the domestic social costs these authoritarian actions and a failure to oppose them produce. I don't mean to be callous, because injustice and repression against any part of the opposition to fascism, is injustice and repression that harms us all; to say nothing of the personal costs to the students targeted for having the audacity to think conducting an ongoing genocide in an open air concentration camp is morally wrong. If you want to know why the regime is pursuing these fascist, repressive policies however, and why the administration before them was happy to lay the groundwork that is today enabling Trump to target anti-genocide protests under the false banner of "fighting antisemitism," I must unfortunately conclude that the answer is "probably, because it's working."

How else can you explain political and military leaders in Israel all but admitting they intend to finish off the genocide they've been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza, without much notice in the American media environment, and amid a collapse in popular resistance to the genocide, even as polling indicates a strong shift in American sympathies away from Israel and its crimes against humanity in Gaza?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-to-remain-in-gaza

'Only Hellfire': Israel Says Lifesaving Aid, Troop Withdrawal Off the Table for Gaza

"Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that the U.S.-backed genocidal policy of blocking lifesaving humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip will continue, and that Israel Defense Forces troops will remain in the embattled Palestinian enclave indefinitely.

"Israel's policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population," Katz said. "No one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, and there are no preparations to enable such aid."

I want to be clear, I'm not saying there's no active resistance to the genocide going on in America, only that the regime's fascist repression is contributing to a climate of fear that's suppression discussion about and resistance to Israel's crimes against humanity in the broader culture. And let's be fair here, the still quite bipartisan nature of support of *this* particular application of fascist terrorism in the American ruling establishment makes opposing Israel's genocide in Gaza perhaps one of the most dangerous acts of anti-fascism a person can undertake in this political moment. When Trump kidnaps a Maryland father and traffics him to a torture prison in El Salvador, the oppositional political and media apparatus in this country are quick to condemn him and demand action. When Trump starts black bagging student protest leaders and shipping them to nightmare jails in politically favorable court districts, that same establishment equivocates, says nothing at all, or sometimes outright supports that repression. Take for example former Biden antisemitism Envoy Deborah Lipstadt:

https://forward.com/news/712297/students-deported-ice-antisemitism-deborah-lipstadt/

Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy

"I’m not opposed to the administration rescinding the student visas of some of the people that they’re rescinding the student visas of,” she said. “But I just think it should be done properly, according to the laws of the country.”

So uh, you got that? The fascism is fine, but god-damnit there are *rules* people! Please keep in mind that this woman is one of the foremost authorities in the world on The Holocaust, so we can presume she knows she's protecting fascists to support a genocide. I assume, but don't know, that she holds no special place in her heart for the Klepto Kaiser, so I can only surmise that she's just a hardcore Zionist and a big fan of bombing children and hospitals.

Look friends, I know that this is a really bad time to ask people to stick their necks out to oppose a genocide, but Israel just bombed literally the last hospital in Gaza and it barely made the evening news. The regime, and indeed much of the larger ruling class establishment that supports settler colonialism, and profits from the genocide by various means, wants to create an environment where speaking out against the genocide in Gaza and Israel's settler colonial massacres is just criminal and subversive enough to stop most of us from doing it. This will then allow them to easily pick off a much smaller number of people who are brave enough and otherwise able to resist the genocide directly. It is vital that we counteract that by keeping the genocide on our lips, and our outrage about crimes against humanity in the discourse; they can't arrest us all - and Gaza, is running out time.

I think at this point you have to be using some kind of motivated reasoning to pretend a Trump regime full of literal nazis who're kidnapping anti-genocide student protestors legally living and studying in the United States, is doing so to fight "antisemitism." This regime doesn't care about antisemitism, it cares about its genocidal settler colonial client state in the Middle East, Israel, but the administration, which frequently dabbles in open antisemitism, is happy to use the fight against really existing hatemongering against Jewish people as a cudgel to accomplish its fascist goals; namely allowing Israel to complete its genocide in Gaza, purging student dissidents with experience fighting the regime, and seizing control of higher education as part of a Yarvinite scheme to create a fascist dictatorship under Trump. As many, including some of the students quoted in the article I'm about to share have noted, weaponizing antisemitism to do fascism is in and of itself a form of antisemitism, and it's certainly not doing anything to help keep Jewish American students safe.

If any of that seemed controversial to you, I'd ask that you please consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student organizer who was lured in for seizure by the promise of a citizenship interview after being marked out by fascist, pro-genocide doxing groups Canary Mission, and Betar for having the nerve to go on 60 Minutes to talk about the occupation of Gaza and why the fight for Palestinian liberation and the fight against antisemitism "go hand-in-hand."

https://zeteo.com/p/jewish-students-slam-trump-arrest-moshen-mahdawi

'New Kind of Antisemitism': Jewish Students Slam Trump's Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi

"Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.

The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.

“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them."

I think one of the students quoted in this article summed up the situation best when he pointed out that Palestinians shouldn't have to be model minorities in American society for folks to treat them like human beings and care about their rights, but by all accounts, including those from school faculty and Jewish students who knew him, Mohsen Mahdawi was in fact that person. Indeed at the time of his kidnapping Mahdawi was actively working to bridge whatever rift exists between Palestinian and Jewish students at Columbia and in the surrounding community; so to claim you're fighting antisemitism by confining and attempting to deport such a person is a particularly crass and odious weaponization of one vulnerable minority to persecute another; which is probably why it appeals so much to a fascist regime full of imperialist Islamophobes and antisemites.

Look, as much as the regime (and society at large) wants to divide us all and put us into little boxes, the reality on the ground is that none of this serves the interests of everyday people in our society, be they Palestinian, Jewish, or neither. Weaponizing Jewish students and the safety of American Jews to install fascism *is* as one student put it, "the new kind of antisemitism." Targeting foreign students legally studying in the United States for opposing a genocide the regime wants to profit from, *is* fascism in action. Using foreign policy as an excuse to expel non-white people *is* part of a fascist project to establish a white ethno-state in America. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we all have a vested interest in stopping the persecution of folks like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil; not just because we could be next, but because a failure to do so will be a terrible stain on our common humanity, and diminish all that is worth saving about our shared society.