Trump’s War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New

As people across the nation look on, aghast, at the footage of vulnerable students of color being abducted in broad daylight by the masked gunmen of ICE, it’s important to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of what we’re living through.

This moment has been compared to McCarthyism. But the Red Scare was sold (however fraudulently) to the American people as a way to protect the country and its government from the threat of communist infiltration. The campaign of brute intimidation ravaging campuses across the country is not being framed as a way of safeguarding the American government or political system; it is, rather, intended to protect a distant foreign regime and to shield it from criticism in the country whose taxpayers are increasingly unwilling to finance its system of apartheid and its program of genocidal violence.