MIT must stand up to McCarthyism
MIT is not just a silent bystander to the new Red Scare. It is guilty. The road to the prison colony in El Salvador was paved in leafy Cambridge
MIT officials are shockingly quiet as the federal government embarks on a McCarthyite campaign of terror against students who oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Palestinian American and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil is the most high-profile target, disappeared in the night by ICE agents on March 8 on the orders of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump announced proudly that this is “the first arrest of many to come.” Khalil is now being held illegally as a political prisoner in a detention facility in Louisiana. As his own letter reads, “While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University.” The same could be said about us here. MIT officials have not uttered a word publicly against this crime, nor have they committed to defending rights to speech.
Khalil’s imprisonment is part of a broader wave of attacks on international students across America in the past weeks, even as Israel has breached the ceasefire and commenced what Haaretz columnist Hanin Majadli has called the “largest child massacre in its history.” Trump’s gestapo is now attempting to deport Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Korean American at Columbia, apparently for pro-Palestine views. The government argues that the mere presence of Chung, a permanent resident who has lived here since she was seven years old, poses “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It took a lawsuit and a court ruling to temporarily prevent Trump’s gestapo from detaining her in the night. As I write, ICE has arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts, who attracted the ire of a Zionist doxxing group Canary Mission for co-authoring an op-ed in the student paper. Now, Mohsen Mahdawi, another Columbia student leader, has been taken away, this time at his citizenship interview.
This campaign of repression and intimidation being waged by the secret police against my fellow students is a response to the Zionist campaign to eradicate Palestinian life in Gaza. Months ago, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch determined that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, while the death toll by direct traumatic injury has now reached an estimated 65,000+ including the latest attacks. I have written in this paper before about my former host brother in Gaza, Mohammed Masbah, who was killed along with his parents in August 2024 by Israeli airstrikes. On March 20, three of his own relatives in the Masbah family were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Absan al-Kabira, Gaza: an elderly man, a young man around my age, and a young child.
A few days ago, Israel killed the journalist Hossam Shabat with a direct airstrike. Shabat had prophetically warned this would happen as Israel laid the groundwork for his targeting through a campaign of disinformation. No U.S. red lines were drawn against his assassins, so Netanyahu’s government killed him with impunity. Shabat was one of the best eyes and ears bearing witness to the horrors committed by the Israeli army in the north. Many of us at MIT followed his updates closely. He was 23 years old, a college student, and chose to cover the genocide when his university was destroyed. In Shabat’s own words:
If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side… I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause.
May he rest in power.
Soon after Hossam’s martyrdom, Zionist settlers stoned and assaulted Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land. The film chronicles the steadfast resistance of Palestinian communities in the south Hebron hills against ongoing ethnic cleansing by settlers and the army. These settlers beat Ballal with impunity, inflicting bloody injuries to his head and stomach. Soldiers then raided the ambulance he called. According to co-director Yuval Abraham, Ballal was handcuffed all night and beaten in a settler-military base. It took a global outcry to free him. Sadly, the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awarded the directors an Oscar three weeks ago, declined to issue a public statement of solidarity. As Basel Adra, the star of the film, wrote: “They refused to support Hamdan just because he is Palestinian. Another sign that our lives don’t matter.” The Academy later issued an apology for not responding adequately.
In the United States, we know the worst is yet to come. On Friday, March 21, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State submitted their recommendations on a sweeping and prejudiced travel ban that will affect students and families of many backgrounds at MIT. Trump’s deportations, the attacks on the right to asylum under both Trump and Biden, and the abusive powers of ICE affect all of us and should alarm anyone committed to civil liberties. They are the authoritarian face of a dehumanizing and broken visa system that treats some human beings as worthy of rights and others as not.
Mahmoud Khalil was right in recognizing that our educational institutions are not simply silent bystanders to the new Red Scare. They are guilty. President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corporation Chair Mark Gorenberg, and General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo share responsibility for Trump imprisoning students. Every official who moved to sic the cops on their students, every statement that legitimized a reactionary and dubious narrative of campus antisemitism, every colleague who told their peers to “keep your head down,” every board member who ignored the democratic calls to end MIT’s ties to the Israeli military and its weapon suppliers, laid the groundwork for the new Red Scare. The roads to the migrant detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and the prison colony in El Salvador were paved in leafy Cambridge.
Fortunately, MIT students have not followed MIT officials in their abandonment of students to the ICE gestapo. In a landmark and binding referendum, 88.5% of the undergraduates that voted in the UA elections called on the MIT administration to 1) formally condemn the illegal arrest of Mahmoud Khalil by federal agents; 2) publicly adopt a policy of non-collaboration with federal immigration enforcement agencies wherever legally possible; and 3) publicly affirm its support for freedom of political speech on campus.
This referendum hands MIT another public mandate. The majority has spoken, like we did on divesting MIT’s ties to the Israeli military last year. What will they do? A bolder position is surely possible. In 2020, MIT sued ICE and the Department of Homeland Security over their overreach. They can do it again. MIT could take a public position against ICE raids, preventively destroy disciplinary records that ICE authorities could subpoena, and agree to pay students’ legal fees or mobilize its lawyers to represent students in court.
I urge MIT officials to take immediate, public action to protect international students at MIT facing harassment and possible imprisonment in retaliation for exercising their inalienable rights to freedom of speech, expression, and association. I urge MIT to end its criminal ties to the Israeli government and its weapon suppliers. I say all this because there are people in our community living in mixed-status families. There are dreamers who came to this country undocumented when they were young. There are families simply trying to live and seek refuge from violence and persecution abroad.
There are those of us from Jewish backgrounds who have seen the same legal architecture used to deny entry to Jews and deport Jewish dissidents during the Cold War now being deployed against Arabs and Muslims. These attacks cannot be successfully confronted without a united opposition. What they show us is that, no matter how aggressively a school punishes its students, it will never be enough for the pro-Israel lobby. Trump and his thugs cannot be appeased, and the best defense is an organized offense.
In fact, we will not be intimidated by Trump, any more than we were intimidated by the criminal Biden presidency. Zionism has lost the educated youth of our society. I am reminded of the Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands who said, “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds,” and “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” I personally have great faith in the power of ordinary people to enact radical change, but this requires us to shake off the moral apathy and selfish careerism of our colleagues. It also requires MIT officials to quit pulling our institution away from the edge of courage.
For us as individuals, we must participate in an organized, collective struggle for justice, whether at MIT or elsewhere. If you haven’t already, it’s not too late for you. Get involved. Join an organization, a union, or a BDS campaign. Write. Speak out publicly. Protest. Give to mutual aid or charity. Support responsible journalism. Give your time to teach displaced students through MIT Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) for Gaza. Radicalize your friend. Go on strike. Put your body in front of a police line. Organize yourselves to foment a crisis in the institution or arena you have the most leverage. We must do what needs to be done to prevent our society from descending further into the darkness of fascism. Our predecessors burned draft cards in the name of stopping murder, while direct actionists today sabotage arms factories. That courage is needed now.
Courage is needed now not because horrors lie around the corner, but because the horrors are already here. We must resist evil not because, in Martin Niemöller’s profound words, that if they first come for the socialists and we don’t speak out, they will come for us next. They have already come, and to be a passive spectator is to forfeit your soul. The crimes against Mahmoud Khalil, against Rümeysa Öztürk, and against the whole of Gaza are not haunting moral allegories. They are not canaries in the coal mine. They are crimes happening now that must be stopped. What Walter Benjamin understood as catastrophe is not an ever-present possibility. It is the present. Catastrophe, what is called in Hebrew the Shoah and in Arabic the Nakba, is now. History alone will not condemn us if we fail to act. What will also condemn us is the darkened light of our own conscience.
Richard Solomon is a doctoral student in political science and a member of the MIT Coalition for Palestine.