Lucas: Tufts student’s op-ed a bad read

Who knew the Trump administration read The Tufts Daily Who knew that anybody read The Tufts Daily for that matter Perhaps now they should It is the university s candidate newspaper that ran the now controversial anti-Israel pro Hamas opinion piece that led to the whisking of Rumeysa Ozturk off the streets of Somerville by federal agents Ozturk a Turkish citizen studying for a doctorate at Tufts on a learner visa was scooped up and detained March after her visa was revoked over her alleged aid of Hamas a designated terrorist group that has taken American lives While ICE has been less than forthcoming over what crime Ozturk is charged with her alleged participation in antisemitic pro-Hamas activity is enough to get her kicked out of the country We do it every day Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced of revoking Ozturk s visa Every time I find one of these lunatics I take away their visa Rubio the son of Cuban immigrants noted We give you a visa to come and investigation and get a degree not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses And if we ve given you a visa and you decide to do that we re going to take it away We don t want it in our country Go back and do it in your country But you re not going to do it in our country The only anti-government protesting Ozturk could do in Turkey under the hardline leadership of President Recep Erdogan would be from a prison cell Come to think of it that is where she is now not in Turkey but in the United States She was in a U S Customs and Immigration Detention Center in Louisiana last week when a federal judge U S District Judge William Sessions ruled on Thursday that she must be transferred to Vermont by May According to Rubio she never would have been granted a visa in the first place if she mentioned she was going to be involved pro-Hamas activity and writing op-eds about it While the federal leadership has yet to offer compelling evidence that Ozturk participated in pro-Hamas and-Israel rallies at Tufts or elsewhere the cabinet did cite the op-ed piece that ran in The Tufts Daily An op ed is a column by contributors that runs on a newspaper page opposite the editorial page Hence op ed It was signed by Ozturk and three others Fatima Rahman Genesis Perez and Nicholas Ambeliotis But if it was that pro-Hamas propaganda piece that got Ozturk in trouble it is pretty thin gruel as they used to say And it took four people to write it which is why it is a laborious read Ozturk and her fellow writers repeated the well-worn accusation of the deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible geocide by the Israeli administration Naturally being propaganda the piece failed to mention who started the war in the first place on Oct when Hamas invaded Israel and horrifically slaughtered specific innocent Jewish men women and children including Americans and kidnapped others This is like blaming Ukraine for starting the war with Russia when it was Russia that invaded Ukraine Still it would be the majority assuring if the Trump administration came up with something more than a badly written pro-Hamas propaganda piece to throw Ozturk out of the country It would also help the administration win its society relations battle with the Democrats over the issue The Boston Globe runs similar op ed pieces with unfamiliar bylines almost every day and nobody seems to take umbrage or even notice Maybe Ozturk should have run the piece in the Globe Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at peter lucas bostonherald com