Trump has turbocharged the attacks on free speech at US universities. I have seen it first-hand | Sandy Tolan
For speaking up for Palestine, I have been targeted – and have seen colleagues and students face arrest and sanctions
- Sandy Tolan is a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles
The Trump administration’s attempted deportation of the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the US, is sparking outrage and nationwide protests. But as shocking as his arrest may have seemed to the world, it was sadly unsurprising to those of us on the frontlines of the war at home over Gaza. Here in the US, a building fury of anti-Palestinian hatred, especially since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, is giving Donald Trump cover to cleanse the country of “undesirables” and undermine free speech and academic freedom.
“If you love Hamas so much why not pack up and move to south Gaza,” an infuriated reader wrote to me last spring, after the LA Times published my opinion article criticising my own university, the University of Southern California (USC), for calling in riot police to arrest peaceful protesters. “Then, there’d be hope that in a future bombing raid your name will be on one of the projectiles.” A few months later came the blast of robo-emails, an estimated 4,000 of them, which all began “Deeply hateful Sandy Tolan,” after my satirical piece lampooning the lockdown of our campus. And who can forget (I can’t) the angry, shouting Texans who objected to my speech outlining evidence for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, just last week?
Sandy Tolan is a professor at the Annenberg school for communication and journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and author of two books on the history of Israel and Palestine, including the international bestseller The Lemon Tree
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