First Amendment Abducted

I’ve been following the stories of various immigrants, international students, and tourists being harshly detained, and found last week’s snatching of Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk from the streets of Somerville, Massachussetts to be especially disturbing. According to news reports, Ozturk did nothing more than write an op-ed for the Tufts student newspaper. NO ONE should be disappeared to a faraway prison cell for writing an opinion column. Criticizing American foreign policy is as American as apple pie. It does not mean you’re a terrorist or have any terrorist sympathies. How many writers and cartoonists got their start objecting to the disastrous Iraq War of 2003? That war involved horrendous human rights abuses, bur at least people could speak without being hauled away by masked goons (though protesters have often been treated poorly).

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