From America First to Israel First
From America First to Israel First
Starting with the battle ground of American universities, Trump is preparing the Ground for a US-led invasion of Iran
Donald Trump is giving a greenlight to the troubled Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to violate the ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Donald Trump and his Zionist entourage in the White House keep pushing ahead with the top priority of their agenda. That priority is to overturn the Iranian government through yet another murderous onslaught on behalf of Israel.
Clearly Trump fully intends to deliver on the main commitment he made to Israel First kingpins and queenpins. They allowed Trump to take power in the rigged system of US electoral politics. Trump’s determination to deliver the goods to his overlords is bad news for the world and especially for US citizens.
If realized, Warrior Trump’s battle strategies at home and in West Asia are guaranteed to push America deeper into the swamp of the Zionist crime syndicate. The power and prestige of ruthless Zionist conglomerate have gotten way out of hand.
Rather than Making America Great Again, Trump’s intention to overturn Iran is sentencing the United States and it people to a future of penury, servitude and vicious Soviet- style thought policing. The reality that these war plans are already unfolding in the way that they are, makes a mockery of Trump’s America First slogan.
It is almost as if Trump is in the process of a ritual mating with the praying mantis that Israel has become. In the final stage of these insects’ copulating process, the female famously devours the male.
In the US-Israel copulation, the insect’s process of absorbing the expendable male is already far advanced. What is being devoured by the female praying mantis of Israel, are the remnants of American freedom and independence. These attributes are the true source of US vigour and strength emerging from the frontier conquest in the era before the US government and people became almost totally subservient to parasitical Zionism now epitomized by Trump.
The Many Issues at Stake in the Khalil Case
As the Trump government prepares the US home front for war with Iran, the US President’s authoritarian nature is becoming increasingly obvious. For the moment university campuses have become the main site of the psychological warfare accompanying the US-Israeli bombing orgies targeting Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen. These bombing blitzkriegs on Israel’s behalf put on full public display the nature of the USA’s policies of permanent warfare. This imperative of the US political economy has prevailed ever since the Pearl Harbor false flag was arranged by the government of Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.
Trump’s campaign to criminalize and harshly punish any criticism of Israel on university campuses is setting out the rules to be enforced across many fields in the years to come. In the not-too-distant future the American people will be required to back and support the direction of a huge proportion of their stamina and resources into war with Iran.
Iran, a country of almost 100,000,000 people, has its own sophisticated system of higher education as well as military R and D. Moreover, Iranians have been preparing for a US invasion of their country for well over a generation. Given the pounding of anti-Iranian war drums especially by the Israel First crowd, the people and government of Iran have had every reason to prepare for war with the United States acting on behalf of Israel. The Iranians are well prepared to withstand a US assault and to mount their own offensive campaign as part of their self-defence strategy.
The Trump government is trying to set an example by intervening in the operations of Columbia University. But Columbia is meant to be just the beginning. Dozens of the other campuses are already being targeted.
The US police state have hired many undercover snitches to infiltrate many universities. The job of the snitches is to go hunting for any indications of faculty or students who seem critical of Israel. If the spies can find any signs of what they deem to be subversive thoughts, writing, or actions that are critical of Israel, major consequences can result. Whole universities can be punished by the withdrawal of $hundreds of millions of federal funding. This fate has already been visited on Columbia University in order to scare the leadership of other schools into compliance.
The infiltration of undercover police assets into the regular ebb and flow of educational activity on campus is disastrous for the health of all sorts of interactions on campus. Are we seeing a harbinger of the proliferation of many other forms of Soviet-style espionage in the Unites States?
The possibilities of relaxed discourse and dialogue are hugely hampered on campus when students and faculty have cause to fear that anyone they encounter might be a thought control cop. Are thought patrol cops to be quickly hired and advanced up the line of university faculties and administration?
There are positive signs that the repressive strategies of the Trump government are arousing significant resistance on campus. This flicker of light should be seen as a positive sign that universities have not become entirely moribund. The mounting resistance at Columbia gives a positive sign that students and faculty and decent people everywhere are starting to meet with organized opposition the rise of the Trumpian police state.
It seems the Trump regime is determined to categorize anything they want as “pro-terrorist, Anti-Semitic, Anti-America activity.” To be classified as an Anti-Semite for opposing genocide, is to be transformed by the thought police into a terrorist who is Anti-American. That’s a reprehensible formula for demonization to justify massive repression. As Arwa Mahdawi reports in the Guardian,
Earlier this week, Donald Trump called Khalil’s arrest the first “of many to come”, and said he would deport students he said engage in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”. And let’s be very clear here: doing anything in support of Palestinians – or simply existing as a Palestinian – seems enough to count as being “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, [and] anti-American” for Trump, who has repeatedly used the word “Palestinian” as a slur.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/mahmoud-khalil-free-speech-civil-liberties
This triad of intertwined accusations pretty much covers the waterfront. Trump’s current campaign has echoes of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings. It harkens back to the times of the attacks by the Bolshevik Cheka on Russian Christians who were slaughtered by the tens of millions in a regime where Anti-Semitism was declared a crime.
Columbia student, Mahmoud Khalil, has become a primary test case in the effort to purge US universities of those who might successfully organize a resistance against the oncoming US invasion of Iran.
Khalil seems to be an exemplary activist and an accomplished post-graduate researcher who took a leading role in organizing the on-campus protest on the Columbia campus last spring. His principled and even-keeled pragmatism caused the Columbia protestors to appoint him lead negotiator in negotiations with the Columbia University administration.
Khalil was arrested recently in a collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and the Dept. of Immigration and Customs (ICE). A advocate of this action expressed the Trump administration’s pride in apprehending this activist at home in front of his family. A menacing precedent is set by the unprovoked arrest of a man charged with nothing and with a very clean legal and academic record.
Attention. See the first statement of US political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil. It comes from within the ICE Detention Centre in Louisiana. The statement has just been added as an addendum beneath this essay. AJH
In all the PR spin to justify an unjustifiable arrest, Khalil is repeatedly associated, Netanyahu-style, with the Palestinian organization of Hamas.
The proposition that anybody expressing condemnation of the Gaza genocide is automatically a terrorist in league with Hamas has become ludicrous. The worst offender is Netanyahu, the very embodiment of the intellectual and moral poverty of Israel First advocates who automatically smear their opponents as supporters of Hamas.
Ironically, the father of this abusive meme, Benjamin Netanyahu, is currently in deep legal trouble for his own close and longstanding collaboration with Hamas, including through his collusion with the Qatari government that generously funded Hamas, including its military wing.
Khalil is a green card holder with an American wife. His opponents describe Khalali as “a guest of the United States.” The US government attempted to deport the activist but a judge stepped in to declare in a court ruling that Khalil should not be expelled from US territory before his case is heard. In an attempt to disappear him, Khalil has been whisked away from his support network, including his family, to the obscurity of a Detention Centre in Louisiana.
The Trump administration is invoking obscure provisions of the Immigration Act to justify its actions. The case is arousing strong responses on all sides of the many fundamental issues at stake in this case.
The Broader Implications of the Attacks on Academic Freedom at Universities
In some ways Trump’s attack on the curriculum, staffing and administration of American universities is but the most recent phase of a long process of subversions led by the same power cabal that has provoked the current controversy in higher education.
Over recent decades the Israel Lobby has mounted many concerted attacks on academic freedom. Academic freedom is the major prerequisite for any university worthy of the name. In the process this lobby has helped to paralyze the capacity of institutions of higher learning to fulfill their higher mission of pursuing truth through the Socratic method, through back and forth exchanges of open debate.
Trump is building on prior initiatives by the US Congress during the Biden administration, when efforts were made to push back on campus condemnation of the US-Israeli genocide aimed at clearing Gaza and the West Bank of its native Palestinian inhabitants.
With a hit squad of Zionist billionaire donors at her side, Elise Stefanik led the inquisition of American higher education in the US Congress. The result was to set in motion the firing of a host of administrators and faculty who do not adhere to the principles of Israel First as an integral principle in the provision of higher education.
When Trump came into office he made Zionist zealot Stefanik the US Ambassador to the United Nations. Now Stefanik’s embodiment of the uncompromising policies of the USA’s embrace of Israel First extremism, is being openly and proudly displayed on a very prominent global stage.
Trump’s war on higher education originates with Netanyahu’s Israeli version of the Trail of Tears meant to culminate in the conquest of Iran. In the latest stage of this Israeli onslaught, Trump is expressing his desire to barge into classrooms to correct what he sees as the errors of wrongthink. He is trying to fulfill this desire by deploying the power of federal funding and certification in the realm of higher education. The goal is meant to coercively impose on all US campuses an embrace of Israel First priorities.
This sequence of recent events constitutes this most serious assault on the principles of free speech and academic freedom in the history of US higher education. Universities are meant to be special places that create the environment for reasoned discussion on any and all topics, including the most delicate issues of public policy even at the very time it is being formulated.
Trump’s insistence that higher education must fall in line with his Israel First agenda is like planting a lethal virus that will spread to kill the core functions not only of universities, but of almost every other kind of institutions. Universities are meant to be very special places where free speech and free thoughts flourish. Universities are meant to be places where the best of our ideals can be studied and upheld.
If these qualities are recklessly sabotaged, as Trump administration is presently in the process of doing, the impact on society is far reaching extending even into many realms. These include the vitality of of the effectiveness of commerce and government and the provision of health care. Without strong protections for the vitality of academic freedom in universities, universities are prone to become little more than commercialized intellectual brothels geared to satisfying the desires of rich and powerful perverts.
Trump’s policies are directing universities to give up their devotion to higher education and become the site of sinecures for friends of the prevailing regime as well job tickets for ambitious ladder climbers. More and more the attainment of university degrees demonstrates the willingness of its holders to comply with the top down formulation of policies, no matter how extreme or contrary to the imperatives of reason and real science.
Trump Joins with AIPAC to Remove a Principled Republican from Congress, Thomas Massie
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who represents a constituency in Kentucky, is another target in Trump’s campaign to eliminate likely opponents of a US invasion of Iran. Such a war would be by far more momentous and consequential than all of the other US wars for Israel so far. These invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the region of Israel, proliferated after the enabling event of 9/11.
Recall George Bush’s most famous speech after 9/11. Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the key components of the “Axis of Evil.” In his speech the US President also set out the rules of an implicit ultimatum. He threatened, either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. There is an echo of this ultimatum in the threat, either you refrain from criticizing Israel or you are, “pro-terrorist, Anti-Semitic and Anti-American.”
Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in Congress, Massie does not accept tainted money from the Israel Lobby. The core organization in this lobby is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC. Massie is made to feel quite alone in Congress because he does not sign up for the big money and free trips to Israel. In the buzz about what happens on these luxurious trips, some speculate that the wild fantasies of many prominent figures are made to come true, Epstein style.
Because of his refusal to approve many Congressional giveaways to the praying mantis of Israel, Massie is one of the only elected officials in Congress who does not have an AIPAC baby sitter. As he explained to Tucker Carlson, each Congressman is assigned his own or her own Israeli-friendly baby sitter. This baby sitter monitors his or her Congressional child to make sure he or she is does not deviate from the straight and narrow of voting for Israel-approved legislation.
Now Trump himself is following the model of AIPAC-style “primarying.” In the context of US politics, primarying means turfing an elected official who votes against the wishes and requirements of the Israel Lobby. It means the provision of major funding to put a contending opponent in a position of elevated prominence so he or she can defeat the incumbent in an electoral primary. The goal is to displace the politician who decides not to ride on the pro-Israel band wagon.
On the surface Trump’s threats “to primary” Massie in the next election appear to come about as a result of the Kentucky Congressman’s unwillingness to give a positive vote to approve debt-encumbered funding bills. Its pretty clear, however, that Trump’s hostility to Massie runs much deeper into the deep soil of his unwillingness to answer to the regular blowing of dog whistles by the puppet masters controlling all branches of the US government.
Trump must be surprised by the extent of public support rallying around Congressman Massie. Massie developed his well-earned reputation by standing up in Congress against the bribery, blackmailing and intimidation regularly applied by the Israel Lobby to US politicians.
The timing of Trump’s attacks come when Massie is in the spotlight. He is gaining wide attention by being one of the only members of Congress who pays no heed to AIPAC’s and Netanyahu’s capture of all branches of the US government.
Is the threat to deplatform Massie being pushed by the Zionist-In-Chief of the US government, another indication that Trump is preparing the ground for a major war. Is Trump intent on removing potentially powerful voices to obstruct domestic resistance capable of turning public opinion against America’s most momentous war ever for Israel?
Addendum: Palestinian Political Prisoner Mahmoud Khalil Releases Statement From Louisiana ICE Detention Center, 18 March, from SCHEERPOST
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights.
I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.
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. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students — some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation — and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.
