CARTOON: Arrest Of Mahmoud Khalil Is Out Of The 'Fascist Playbook' & Reveals Depths Of Trump Threat
"Deporting anti-war students who are trying to end genocide and silencing political speech endangers all of us. We will not be divided."
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
FASCIST PUTSCH ACCELERATES: Outrage After ICE Detains Palestinian Student Activist
"Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world's most repressive regimes."
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (3/6/25)
Civil rights organizations, legal experts, and lawmakers were among the chorus voicing alarm Sunday and into Monday over the dire implications of the Trump administration's brazen arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian rights organizer who helped lead Columbia University student protests against Israel's assault on Gaza.
"The Trump administration's outrageous detention of Mahmoud is designed to instill terror in students speaking out for Palestinian freedom and immigrant communities," said Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has helped organize nationwide demonstrations against Israel's catastrophic war on the Palestinian enclave.
"This is the fascist playbook," the group added. "We all must fiercely reject it, and universities must start protecting its students."
Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident with a green card, was arrested on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stormed his university-owned apartment in Manhattan. Khalil's attorney toldThe Associated Press that the ICE agents also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, an American citizen.
As of Monday morning, Khalil—an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin—was being held in an ICE facility in Louisiana, and the Trump administration is moving to revoke his green card.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, said Sunday that Khalil's arrest was carried out "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism."
But JVP and other advocacy groups warned that the administration's purported crackdown on antisemitism is a pretext for a dangerous assault on civil liberties, including those of Palestinian rights advocates.
"We are not fooled by the Trump administration's claims that this blatantly unconstitutional and authoritarian attack is somehow in the name of Jewish safety," said JVP. "Deporting anti-war students who are trying to end genocide and silencing political speech endangers all of us. We will not be divided."
"The unlawful detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism. It's clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren't MAGA-approved."
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement that "arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world's most repressive regimes."
"It's genuinely shocking that this appears to be what's going on right here," Jaffer added. "Universities must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself. They must make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law."
Khalil's arrest came days after Trump threatened to imprison students engaged in what he described as "illegal protests." AP reported that "Khalil's arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump's promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring."
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Sunday that "the Trump administration's detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights."
"The unlawful detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism. It's clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren't MAGA-approved—which is a frightening escalation of Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration law," Lieberman added. "Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation."
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Mahmoud Khalil: ICE Detains Green Card Holder Over Columbia University Gaza Activism
Democracy Now! (3/10/25)
Immigration agents with the Department of Homeland Security have detained a leader of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York. Mahmoud Khalil, who is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, is a green card holder and is married to a U.S. citizen; his wife is eight months pregnant.
Immigration officials told Khalil's lawyer his green card was being revoked. Khalil recently graduated from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and his whereabouts are unknown.
20-minute video
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’
”The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.”
―Aaron Bushnell
‘A new phase’: Why Some Climate Activists Are Turning To Sabotage Instead Of Protest
Repressive state action inspiring clandestine attacks on the ‘property and machinery’ of the fossil fuel economy.
By Damien Gayle
The Guardian (3/8/25)
It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.
Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”
Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds.
Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.
In a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform, Shut the System (STS), the group that claimed credit for the action in the City that took place in January, says it is “kickstart[ing] a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy”.
“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”
The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims.
He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years – reduced on Friday after an appeal – for organising road blocks on the M25.
Logical response to state crackdowns
“If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure … by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.
“You can’t just keep doing that … The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”
STS is not the first group to take clandestine direct action against fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to funnel jet fuel from Southampton to west London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on a construction vehicle.
This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tyres of more than 100 SUVs parked at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall – a repeat of an action carried out last year. And the Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign group that urges people to take autonomous clandestine action against SUVs in cities by deflating their tyres, have targeted hundreds of vehicles through activists heeding their call.
In the City, the action of STS, though carefully planned, had minimal impact. “We did our research, as best as we could and we planned about what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes,” the activist said.
“We did everything we could to maximise safety for everyone, and then in my small group we found targets and divvied them up.”
A cybersecurity expert said there had been “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the area, but the network continued to function.
“We had varying success throughout the UK,” the activist admitted. STS also claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds. “I am aware of people in other areas that did this … where they then called up the next day and the phone lines were down. There is obviously a learning curve to these things.”
A whole new phase of activism
But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin.
But it is in France that the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it.
Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said: “France really is the one case in recent years … where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful – and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”
Four years ago Malm, a Swedish social ecologist, penned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polemic on the future of effective climate action and an exploration of the tactic of sabotage. It has become a set text in the movement, and even spawned a movie adaptation.
Malm says that, with issues such as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza taking up activist energy, and the energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s war in Ukraine potentially discrediting those targeting fossil fuels as “stooges of Putin”, militant action for the climate has been on a downswing.
Nevertheless, he still sees it as the only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.
“One mistake made by the offshoots of XR [such as Just Stop Oil] – they started escalating a little bit and doing slightly more radical stuff … while still sticking to the protocol to wait until the cops come and arrest them,” he said.
“If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”
The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group’s actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” he said.
ALERT! Be sure to watch the 8-minute video in the article on a whole new kind of activism in France and Germany.
And as yet another example of the need for change, NOW…
BREAKING! At Least 32 Casualties In Fiery North Sea Collision Between Oil Tanker & Cargo Ship
An oil tanker and a cargo ship collided off the British coast in the North Sea on March 10, 2025. (Photo: @SputnikIntl/X)
By Julia Connely
Common Dreams (3/10/25)
British emergency workers on Monday were responding to a collision between an oil tanker and a cargo ship off the eastern coast of the United Kingdom in the North Sea.
At least 32 casualties were "brought ashore in Grimsby," a port town in Lincolnshire, reportedThe Guardian, and the two ships were believed to be a U.S.-flagged tanker called the MV Stena Immaculate and a cargo vessel called the Solong, which was headed for Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Photos and videos posted on social media showed the vessels on fire and surrounded by thick black smoke.
Martyn Boyers, chief executive of the Port of Gimsby East, told the BBC that a "massive fireball" was seen erupting around the time of the collision.
"They must have sent a mayday out—luckily there was a crew transfer vessel out there already," said Boyers. "Since then there has been a flotilla of ambulances to pick up anyone they can find."
Boyers told Sky News that "a haze and a smog" had been reported off the coast on Monday.
"It's been very foggy, and the fog has never lifted. So I would imagine that at that time, when the accident took place, that there would have been fog," said Boyers. "Having said that all these vessels now... they've got every, every bit of kit that's known to man about how to navigate and radars and everything. So it's a very, very unusual and tragic accident."
His Majesty's Coastguard, the U.K. maritime agency, reported that an alarm was raised about the crash about 10 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire at 9:48 am local time.
The Solong appeared to have struck the oil tanker when it was anchored, according to tracking data.
The BBC reported Monday morning that all members of the Stena Immaculate crew had been accounted for and were safe; it was not clear whether there were still people in the Solong's crew who still needed to be located.
Climate campaigners have warned against continued oil extraction in the North Sea; in January, advocates celebrated as grassroots campaigners and groups won a lawsuit stopping two fossil fuel projects by Shell and Equinor from moving forward there.
David Steel, manager of the Isle of May National Nature Reserve, noted that the disaster happened just as seabirds' breeding season is about to begin.
"Seabirds pouring back into the North Sea as they head to colonies down east coast," said Steel, "and this is a breaking headline we didn't need today."
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Hi Mark
Could this be a resurgence of the Environmental Liberation Front?
I hope so with all my heart.
I passed that link about the cargo and tanker ship collision on to my British husband. It's not too far from where he's from originally. :( I sure hope Extinction Rebellion can shut down the oil industry in Great Britain at least. Think of all the ruined fishing grounds from the oil spills alone!
I'm getting worried about these "deportations" of resident aliens (Green card holders). Every person on US soil has the same rights as citizens (barring being able to vote in federal elections), and those rights include free speech. Mr. Khalil wasn't involved in anything violent, so there's no reason to suspect him of anything nefarious. Our Fascist State (TM) is so paranoid that it's losing the plot and it wants to terrify the rest of us from speaking out. This means that we can't stop our protests and boycotts now--they're WORKING!!