Noura Erakat: Trump’s Abuses & Mahmoud Khalil’s Arrest Are Products of U.S. Imperialism Coming Home
www.democracynow.org
Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat responds to the arrest of Columbia University student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and situates it in the long, bipartisan history of anti-Palestine suppression of free speech. “It was the Biden administration, it was the Democratic establishment, that has created the conditions that we are now seeing taken advantage of,” she says of Khalil’s targeting by the Trump administration for deportation. Erakat calls for continued resistance and study of U.S. imperialism and Zionism in the face of racist repression. “This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine in order to understand ourselves and what’s coming and our responsibility in the world as an imperial power.”

“There is no way to put your head down and survive this moment.” Noura Erakat, human rights attorney, professor and author of the book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine explains how the effects of colonialism and the racist rhetoric targeting Palestinians will inevitably have a “boomerang effect” on people living in the U.S.

Erakat explains that U.S. foreign policy and treatment of Palestinians abroad predicted the brutal treatment of students protesting for an end to the war on Gaza on campuses across the U.S. With the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the constitutional and due process rights of green card holding permanent residents hanging in the balance, Erakat says, “there is no way to defeat fascism at home without combatting empire abroad.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)