Tag: universities

Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal is Former Israeli Spy

The professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official, MintPress News can reveal.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), was abducted by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday for his role in organizing protests last year against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Khalil’s dean, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.

Spooks in Our Midst

Before entering academia, Dr. Yarhi-Milo served as an officer and an intelligence analyst with the Israeli Defense Forces. Given that she was recruited into the intelligence services because of her ability to speak Arabic fluently, her job likely entailed surveilling the Arab population.

After leaving the world of intelligence, she worked for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. While there, she met and married her husband, Israel’s official United Nations spokesperson.

Although she is now an academic, she has never left the world of international security, making the subject her area of expertise. She has made a point of trying to lift women’s voices in the field. One of these was the then-U.S. Director of National Security, Avril Haines, whom she spoke with in 2023. But even though Khalil was a student in her school, she had nothing to say about his arrest. Indeed, rather than speak out on the issue (as activists have demanded), she instead chose this week to invite Naftali Bennett, prime minister of Israel from 2021 to 2022, to speak at Columbia. Students protesting Tuesday’s event were condemned by university authorities for “harassing” Yarhi-Milo.

Unprecedented Protests, Unprecedented Repression

Columbia was the epicenter of a massive protest movement across university campuses nationwide last year. It is estimated that at least eight percent of all American college students participated in demonstrations denouncing the genocidal attack on Gaza and calling on educational institutions to divest from Israel. The response was equally vast in its scale. Well over 3,000 protestors were arrested, including faculty members themselves.

The nationwide movement began at Columbia on April 17, when a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors were shocked when university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the New York Police Department – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Mahmoud Khalil was among the leaders of the movement. The Syrian-born Palestinian refugee was willing to speak calmly and cogently to the press about the protest’s goals. A permanent resident of the United States, he was abducted by ICE on Saturday.

“ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come,” President Trump stated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Trump’s ominous threat, announcing, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” In another clear threat, the Trump administration moved to cancel $400 million in funding to Columbia University, citing the institution’s failure to sufficiently crack down on “antisemitic” incidents on campus.

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Panic politics: Law professors’ umpteenth ‘constitutional crisis’ falls flat

It’s only March, and we have yet another declaration of a “constitutional crisis.”

The latest dire declaration comes from roughly 950 law professors, who refer generally to actions and policies implemented by President Trump as “beyond his constitutional or statutory authority.”

So — what happens if the “experts” hold a crisis and no one shows up?

After years of such claims, the perpetual crisis has left a dwindling number of people inclined to panic. Many simply have more pressing matters at the moment and have the same reaction of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”

The latest letter follows a familiar pattern that has played out like a political perpetual motion machine since the first Trump impeachment. It works something like this: A legal academy composed of largely liberal academics announces a “constitutional crisis” caused by conservatives, and then a largely liberal media runs the story with little scrutiny or skepticism. On most echo-chambered media sites, the public rarely hears an opposing view.

The purging of conservative and libertarian faculty from most universities has been a long-standing problem. In self-identified surveys, professors confirm that some departments lack a single Republican. A study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez found that only 9 percent of law school professors in the top 50 law schools identify as conservative.

Law schools are not unique. A survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4 percent as “very conservative.” A 2017 study found that only 15 percent of faculty members were conservative. Another analysis found that 33 out of 65 departments lacked even a single conservative faculty member.

In other words, it is embarrassingly easy to get 1,000 law professors to sign off on letters claiming endless constitutional crises caused by Trump or conservatives.

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Leftist UCLA Law Professor Sparks Uproar After Calling for a Military Insurrection Against President Trump

Another radical leftist has been caught calling for violence against President Trump.

As TGP readers know, leftists across America have issued countless calls for violence against members of the Trump Administration for weeks, including the president himself.

This situation has gotten so dire that agitators are now accosting the children of these officials.

On Saturday, UCLA Criminal Law Professor Peter Arenella posted a tweet saying that the U.S. Military must launch an insurrection against Trump in order to stop America from becoming an ally of Russia. Yes, he actually said the U.S. military must destroy democracy to prevent America from joining forces with an authoritarian regime.

How dangerous and ironic.

“At this point, my only hope for the US to avoid becoming an ally to Russia is a violent resistance by our military,” he wrote. “Tragic to say that because the military are trained to avoid any politically motivated intervention. Firing all the Joint Chief of Staff military leaders and replacing them with military acolytes of Trump anticipated that possibility and acted swiftly to minimize that type of intervention.

Ultimately, we will get what we deserve by giving Trump a second chance to destroy our democracy, he added.

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California college axes women’s locker rooms to boost transgender inclusivity

A California university is doing away with traditional men’s and women’s locker rooms in an effort to support transgender students – even as the state’s governor condemns transgender athletes in women’s sports. 

The University of California, Davis announced plans last month to renovate the locker rooms at its Activities and Recreation Center, citing student feedback as the motivation for the $5 million project.

‘We value inclusive, accessible environments that accommodate the diverse needs of our community,’ schools officials said at the time, according to Fox News. 

‘We are pleased to announce that we will be remodeling the current locker room facilities to implement universal locker rooms.

‘All campus and recreation members can use our universal locker rooms, regardless of who they are and how they identify,’ they continued, noting the space will be ‘inclusive of members with disabilities and all gender identities.’

But after some students expressed concerns about the safety of the ‘universal’ locker rooms, which were seized upon by critics of the transgender movement, the university revised its statement, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.  

It now says, ‘All Campus Recreation members will be able to use our new locker rooms. These spaces include ADA-accessible facilities for members with disabilities.’

Under the plans for the new locker room, the university would offer a handful of private cabanas, changing rooms and toilet rooms with floor-to-ceiling walls and doors.

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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USU student felt unsafe in dorm with trans resident assistant, testifies to legislature

A young female student at USU, who lived in a women’s dorm suite where a purported transgender resident assistant was assigned after Christmas break, called the RA placement unacceptable and said she did not feel safe.

In her first interview, Avery Saltzman said she felt compelled to speak up for herself and “to protect girls.”

When asked if it was an assignment she could have lived with, Saltzman said no.

“No, not at all,” the 19-year-old freshman said. “It’s unacceptable, really, feeling unsafe in your own private spaces.”

Saltzman’s mother first raised concerns weeks ago, and after initially defending its housing policies, USU suddenly announced an “external review” of the programs.

GOP legislative leaders said lawmakers would address the concerns — and Thursday, Saltzman testified in favor of HB 269, Privacy Protections in Sex-designated Areas.

Among other things, the bill says, “to preserve the individual privacy of males and females, a degree-granting institution that provides student housing may only rent to, assign, or otherwise place an individual in a dwelling unit that is sex-designated within the institution student housing.”

Saltzman said she is not anti-trans, she supports inclusive housing, and moved rather than share the women’s space — which has a shared bathroom — with a transgender RA.

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Repression vs. Activism – Colleges Crack Down While Gaza Solidarity Persists

Last spring, campuses across the country became flashpoints of anti-war resistance, as thousands of students mobilized in a powerful demonstration of moral conscience and collective action. Their demands were clear: an end to U.S. complicity in the genocide in Gaza and the dismantling of the war machine that sustains it. This wave of activism commanded both national and international attention.

Yet, in recent months, despite the ongoing slaughter and the White House’s egregious proposals to further orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, mainstream coverage of the student movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people – and in opposition to what Martin Luther King Jr. condemned as “the madness of militarism” – has steadily faded from the headlines.

Despite the relative media silence, and amid an intensifying campaign of institutional repression, the campus-based fight against the intolerable status quo has not ceased. Students remain at the forefront of the struggle for a more just, less militarized, and truly democratic world.

What coverage remains has largely functioned to reinforce the narrative that universities – initially caught off guard by the spontaneous protests of the spring – have successfully reasserted control over their campuses from what they have long framed as unruly agitators.

In November, The New York Times framed administrators’ crackdown on campus protests as a success, reporting that their efforts “seem to be working.” These draconian measures have had a chilling effect on campus expression – undermining free speech, stifling dissent, and betraying the university’s role as a laboratory for democracy and social change.

Nonviolent civil disobedience – a cornerstone of student activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the anti-Vietnam War and anti-Apartheid struggles – is now being met with the heavy hand of repression, as both the legal system and university conduct boards enforce arbitrary, vague, and inconsistently applied punitive measures.

These crackdowns have disproportionately targeted advocates for Palestinian liberation and their allies. This assault on Palestine-related dissent has already prompted multiple complaints over civil rights violations.

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Department of Education Cuts $15 Million in DEI Grants at Three Universities

Although Democrats are melting down over Elon Musk and President Trump’s attempts to downsize the federal government and ending woke DEI programs, throwing tantrums will not stop what’s coming.

Just days after taking office, President Trump signed a Memorandum placing all federal Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) employees on administrative leave, pending the termination of these programs under Trump’s “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” Executive Order.

President Trump has also made it clear that the Department of Education (DOE) is set for major changes, if not complete closure.

The Gateway Pundit reported that Democrats, angry that an agency with an abysmal record for student achievement may actually have to face questions about its failures, attempted to barge their way into the DOE building in their latest publicity stunt.

Despite their petulant mewings, on Friday, the DOE announced it had canceled $15 million in federal grants that were used to fund diversity programs at three universities in order to align with the President’s Executive Order.

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NCAA Had The Power To Keep Men Out Of Women’s Sports This Whole Time

The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced an about-face on its 2022 “participation policy” for transgender-identifying athletes this week: No longer are men allowed to self-identify their way into women’s sports.

“The new policy limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only,” the NCAA said in a press release, forced to acknowledge the genetic differences between men and women while bitterly clinging to the anti-science trans-speak “assigned at birth,” as if chromosomal makeup is arbitrary.

Regardless of the continued language manipulation, however, the policy change stands — and it’s a direct result of female athletes demonstrating the myriad ways male athletes have harmed them, plus a strong leader in the White House who is willing to listen and act.

On Wednesday, just one day before the NCAA policy reversal, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (titled simply “Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports“) that stripped all funding from educational programs that let men and boys infiltrate women’s and girls’ athletics. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly,” the order reads, not only for reasons of “safety” and “fairness,” but also to preserve “dignity, and truth.”

The NCAA allowing males to compete against females “is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports,” Trump’s order says.

The president is clearly listening to the many brave women who have risked their reputations and much more to share their stories of discrimination and danger. One of these women, NCAA Division 1 athlete Sia Liilii, then the captain of the University of Nevada, Reno, women’s volleyball team, led her teammates in protesting and then forfeiting a game against San Jose State University’s women’s team because it included a trans-identifying male player. As IW Features highlights in a documentary about Liilii’s experience, her school refused to support its own women’s team.

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Former UPenn Athletes Sue To Expunge Trans Swimmer Lia Thomas’ Records

Three former swimmers for the University of Pennsylvania have sued the Ivy League college to expunge the records of transgender athlete Lia Thomas.

Alums Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist filed the suit on Tuesday, alleging they suffered emotional trauma after Thomas competed as a woman, destroying everything they’d worked their entire lives to achieve. The lawsuit was filed one day before President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning biological men from competing in women’s sports, the Fox News reports.

The three actual women claim that their former school, along with Harvard University, the NCAA, and the Ivy League Council of Presidents subjected them to harassment and abuse in violation of federal laws by allowing Thomas to compete on their team.

“The UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’ participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they should seek counseling and support from CAPS and the LBGTQ center,” reads the lawsuit.

2004 grads Kaczorowski and Holmquist, and Estabrook, a 2022 graduate, say they were “repeatedly emotionally traumatized” after Thomas was allowed to compete with them in violation of Title IX, and say that school officials pushed pro-trans ideology on them the entire time Thomas was on the team.

They also allege that school administrators invited them to a talk titled “Trans 101,” where they were the problem if they had issues with a “trans-identifying male” on their team.

School officials also allegedly warned them against speaking out about Thomas or they’d be labeled transphobes and risk not finding jobs upon graduation.

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