Friends,

I would like to tell you a little story about a young woman. Her parents were from Syria and, like so many others before them and from all over the world, they came to America to start a family and to give their children a better life. This is the American story, the immigrant story. The parents settled in the U.S. in a Syrian-American community, just as the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Polish immigrants before them had gravitated to their own communities, a safe harbor to set down roots and to grow as new Americans. But this Syrian-American community was not in a random place, it was in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. Thousands of miles from Syria, they made a new home and gave birth to a baby girl, an American citizen, there in Flint. She grew up in the shadows of the bombed-out factories of General Motors, and right around the time she graduated high school and started college, the Governor of Michigan, in an act of political terrorism, diverted the city’s water, poisoning the city’s residents. This killed people in Flint and it left the children of Flint poisoned for life. And for this crime, the governor faced no consequences, no arrest, no charges of homicide. He was guilty of nothing other than “running government like a business.” A true patriot, a good ol’ fashioned American white guy showing his indifference toward a majority-Black city.

But despite it all, this little girl who grew up here did not leave — even when she had the chance. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Michigan-Flint campus. There, this child of immigrants excelled in science and biology — she conducted research on the Zika virus, child labor in India, and lead poisoning in Flint due to the poisoned water.

When she graduated with honors in the spring of 2018, she was not just one graduation cap in a sea of students in the crowd that day. Instead, she was chosen as the commencement speaker for her graduating class. As the school’s administrators said in bestowing this honor upon her, she epitomized the tradition of “Leaders & Best at the University of Michigan.”

With her Syrian parents looking proudly on, Noor Abdalla addressed her fellow students. She told the assembled students about her upbringing, and then she described the horrors of the civil war in Syria which at the time was entering its 8th bloody year. And then… and then she said this:

“We are all so privileged to be living in a country such as this one and to be receiving an education that is safe and accessible… I go to class and I know that I’m safe in so many ways. Not only safe from an air strike but I am safe to speak my mind whenever I feel it necessary. I’m safe to converse with my professors and have passionate talks about things that I love. And I’m safe to dream big.

“We must embrace our privilege and channel it into something greater, channel it to help those that may not have access to an education, those that have to travel miles and miles to get to school, those that are prohibited to learn and those that cannot read or write.

“Class of 2018, what a world we live in. You turn on the TV to see one devastating tragedy after the next — whether it’s gun violence in high schools all over the country, mass shootings, discrimination based on the color of your skin, and even right here in our city with our very own Flint water crisis.”

It is a beautiful and powerful speech — and it ends with her quoting Nelson Mandela:

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Well…

Seven years later, and Noor Abdalla is not safe.

She is not safe to speak her mind on college campuses — and neither is anyone else. If education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world, then it makes sense that the Trump administration is targeting students on college campuses, attacking and dismantling the Department of Education, banning books, and scaring people into silence.

One week ago this past Saturday, this same Noor Adballa — who is now 8 months pregnant — and her husband, Mahmoud, returned to their apartment in a graduate student housing building and were confronted by a gang of white men who refused to identify themselves. The leader of these men was a middle aged caucasian with a beer belly who was dressed in cargo pants and a Marvel comic book t-shirt. He says to Mahmoud, “We have you!” And as these goons drag Noor’s husband away, she asks them who they are, what department of the government do they represent, and she asks for their names.

“We don’t give our name,” says one of the men as Mahmoud is stuffed into a van and driven off into the dark of night.

All of this would seem insane — outlandish, impossible, fictional — except for the inconvenient fact that we live in a world of non-fiction film and this was all caught on video by Noor Abdalla herself, a young woman from Flint, Michigan, commencement speaker of the 2018 U of M-Flint graduating class. A young woman armed with an education and a camera.

Here is the video that Noor Abdalla made of her husband being illegally taken away. She filmed this while in absolute terror, her husband seemingly being kidnapped by a group of white thugs, not knowing if she would ever see him again. Everyone should watch this:

Mahmoud Khalil — Noor’s husband — was a leading voice for Gazans in the anti-genocide campus protests at Columbia University last year. Mahmoud’s parents are Palestinian, and he grew up in a refugee camp in Syria. When the war in Syria spread, Mahmoud became a refugee of both Palestine and Syria, his family relocating to a refugee camp in Lebanon. From this impossible childhood, Mahmoud Khalil rose to one of the highest institutions of education in the world, Columbia University, where he was a graduate student — and a legal permanent resident of the United States of America with his government-issued Green Card. The holder of a Green Card has virtually all the same rights as an actual citizen other than the right to vote.

The United States government has no legal standing to detain him, nor to deport him. When asked why the Trump Administration is seeking to revoke Mahmoud’s Green Card and illegally kick him out of the country, the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security said that Mahmoud had “put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity.”

Wow. “Pro-Palestinian activity!” Scary stuff. UnAmerican Activities! Real Americans support Genocide, dammit!

“KILL THEM ALL! KILL THEM ALL! KILL THEM ALL! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

To be clear, campus protests are NOT a threat to the United States of America! In fact, “pro-Palestinian activity” is not a threat to ANY ONE. The only people who could conceivably be threatened by “pro-Palestinian activity” would be someone who wants to kill or harm Palestinian people. And those are the people we should be deporting. Let’s start with the guy in the Marvel comic book t-shirt who handcuffed Mahmoud — and let’s toss in the immigrant South African billionaire in the White House who has sieg heil-ed his way into the Republican Party’s soul.

Three weeks ago today, I sent a letter just like this to my mailing list and my Substack subscribers. It was called “Our Muslim Boy Wonder” and it was about a Syrian student who came to America, met a young woman in Wisconsin, and together they had a child. That child grew up to be Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. In that letter, I wrote about how this administration’s policy to round up and imprison and deport and separate immigrant families will rob this country of the future leaders and scientists and doctors and inventors who will guide and re-shape America. We deport them at our own peril.

Three days after I sent my letter, I was shocked to learn that I had hurt Donald Trump’s snowflake feelings, and that he had ordered the Trump White House to publicly rebuke me, calling me a  “disgraced ‘filmmaker’” (“disgraced” I don’t know what that means, I’m an Eagle Scout and the nuns gave me all A’s, but putting those extra quote marks around  ‘filmmaker’ — that’s a low blow and will lead to numerous Republican defeats in next year’s Midterms).

Ten days later, the Trump Administration sent their Marvel comic book hero to arrest Mahmoud Khalil.

In the week since Mahmoud was taken away, Universities across the country have, instead of standing up for their students and for the constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, empaneled administrators to root out activists and protestors on their own campuses. Under threat from the Trump Administration — and with the Department of Justice announcing plans to investigate universities across the country using “anti-terrorism” laws — the nation’s institutes of higher learning have turned on their students and have, as they have many times before, put on full display the intellectual weakness of the intellectual “thinking” class.

What is happening is not isolated. It is widespread and it is relentless. Each attack by this administration is a test to see how the public and the University administrators and the press react. So far, it’s working. UCLA has created a panel to investigate its students, so has Columbia. At Columbia’s vaunted school of journalism — which has been and should still be a temple to the 1st Amendment — students last week were told by their administrators to remove “commentary on the Middle East” from their social media. “Nobody can protect you,” the school’s dean told the students. “These are dangerous times.”

Just days after rounding up Mahmoud Khalil, Trump’s DHS also targeted an architect who attended Harvard and Columbia. Her crime — aside from being a Woman, an Indian national, and a Fulbright Scholar — was “liking tweets” that highlighted “human rights violations in the war in Gaza.” She has fled to Canada.

In yet another case, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, was denied entry to the United States this past Thursday. She holds an H1-B visa for people with expertise in their fields. Her crime — aside from being a Woman and a Muslim — was visiting her family in Lebanon. Her job? Well, her boss at the Brown University Health’s organ transplant division says that Dr. Alawieh is a “crucial” part of the team that “works on getting people in Rhode Island onto the list for kidney transplants.” The U.S. government believes she is a threat to the American public — and yet she is the one trying to save American lives.

Last week, as protests spread across the nation, on campuses and in city squares and in front of court houses, demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil, Democratic members of Congress circulated a letter calling on the Trump Administration to “Free Mahmoud” — and in the end, only an embarrassingly paltry 14 Democrats out of 262 Dems in the House and Senate signed the letter. Fourteen.

Those brave fourteen are Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, Nydia Velázquez of New York, Delia Ramirez of Illinois, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Jasmine Crockett and Al Green of Texas, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Ayanna Pressley and James McGovern of Massachusetts, Lateefah Simon of California, André Carson of Indiana, and Nikema Williams of Georgia. A fifteenth member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wrote a separate letter the day before, co-signed with three members of New York’s city council.

The rest of the Party? Silent.

But perhaps that’s nothing new.

Fifty-five years ago this spring, students at Kent State University protested the Vietnam War. Four students were killed by the National Guard and 9 others were injured. Their crime? “Pro-Palestinian activity.” Oh, wait — I think maybe it was “Pro-Vietnamese activity.” I can’t remember exactly. The tune has changed, but the song stays the same. And so does the inaction of those who let it happen.

Noor, please know, we, your fellow neighbors from Flint, stand with you and your husband against this immoral act. Silence is not an option.

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