April 8, 2025
Dear Sebastian, Oliver, and Chloe,
You have each been accepted into one of America’s finest universities. I am so very proud of you. In my twilight years, I want to share my perspective with you about the events at Tufts and Columbia over free speech and the Gaza Armageddon.
As you know, I was born and raised in Syria and, therefore, I deeply feel the pains and tribulations of that region. I hope that the Syrian bit in your DNA has led you to care about this troubled part of the world too.
When my good fortune brought me to Philadelphia in 1966, I loved America from day one. I felt at home. I was proud to become a part of that melting pot that is America, in its zillion ethnicities, religions, sects, languages, and skin colours.
When I worked at No. 2 Broadway in Wall Street for three years, across from the Statue of Liberty, I spent countless lunch hours in Battery Park gazing at Lady Liberty, contemplating the genius of the democratic ideals and institutions of the American Republic.
It never crossed my mind that I needed to leave behind in Damascus my political beliefs to conform with America’s politics of the day. Conformity was the stuff of the Communists in the former Soviet Union and the tinpot dictatorships in the lands of fear of the Middle East, not the United States.
In 1967, when I was still a student at the Wharton School, I demonstrated in front of City Hall without hesitation, fear, or concern against a visit of Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, to Philadelphia. Meir was the lead gaslighter of the falsehood that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without a land.”
And those of you who follow your Aunt Sarah on Instagram know that she regularly protests on the streets of London against Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinians. She knows that this right of protest is protected by British Law.
Sadly, today, Donald Trump and his henchmen are on a crusade to not only muzzle freedom of expression, but also to impose Trump’s idiosyncrasies and prejudices, on, even, universities. They sold their integrity for a “few silver” to aggrandize the cult of personality of this convicted felon in multiple courts of law. Trump has turned America’s sense of freedom, morality, justice, civility, and democracy into a cesspool. I am heartbroken.
Academic freedom must remain sacrosanct. Universities are society’s laboratories. Without freedom of thought and expression, universities lose much of their meaning. Universities provide the excitement of critical thinking, constructive discourse, debate, agreement, and disagreement. They sharpen creative thinking.
Academic freedom must belong to all students and faculty regardless of religion, skin colour, nationality, visa status, rich or poor.
These beliefs informed my horror at the treatment of three students engaged in campus activities in support of Gaza at Tufts and Columbia: Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts, South Korean Yunseo Chung and Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia.
In the age of Trump, conformity symbolizes the cancer that has suddenly befallen America, universities in particular. To deport Ozturk and Chung is shocking. To throw Khalil in jail pending a trial is frightening. Their maltreatment will forever stain America’s standing the world over.
This atmosphere of fear will divert bright minds the world over from US universities to British, French, and German universities. America will, regrettably, be the loser.
Ozturk, Chung, and Khalil, along with the many principled Jewish and other up-right American students have been courageously trying to awaken whatever is left of America’s sense of justice, humanity, and decency. Both women are holders of valid student visas.
Khalil is a permanent resident Green Card holder and married to an American citizen. When I gained my Green Card in 1971, I was made aware that I had all the responsibilities and privileges of a citizen, except the right to vote.
While the thuggish treatment of Ozturk, Chung, and Khalil at the hands of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is barbaric, the bigger tragedy is in stripping foreign students and faculty of their right to peacefully demonstrate their beliefs, as these three students did within the protective womb of the university.
In defence of Ozturk, Tufts’ Declaration of April 1, 2025, is commendable. Tufts stated that Öztürk was one of several authors of an opinion piece in the student newspaper and that her action was “not in violation of any Tufts policies,” or the “University’s understanding of the Immigration and Naturalization Act.”
Columbia must follow Tufts’ example. America’s universities must rise in defence of the right to free expression, foreign students and professors included.
The Washington Post reported on April 4, 2025, that Jonathan Greenblatt, Chief Executive and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, the leading organization fighting antisemitism, questioned the aggressive effort to find and deport foreign students who have protested on behalf of Palestinians, suggesting that the administration is “betraying American values, denying due process, and punishing people for their views rather than their actions.”
I am proud of Greenblatt, a Jew, who stood up to defend the rule of law. Not surprisingly, Greenblatt belongs to generations of intellectual Jews who led liberation and justice movements over the long sweep of history everywhere.
Now, I want to turn to the message which led to the persecution and prosecution of those who stand-up for Justice in Trump’s tinpot dictatorship.
The students reminded us that politicizing the Bible politicized the Quran and that the Europeans who took advantage of the British Government’s Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, were supposed to live among the Palestinians in peace:
“Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
But, instead, by 1948, the newcomers took over much of Palestine, created the State of Israel, and threw 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes. The students awakened us to the massacres and terror in the village of Deir Yassin and the scores of other villages, which drove the Palestinians to flee their homes. The students protested Israel’s schemes to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its original inhabitants. They stood against the injustice of labelling the refugee who wants his stolen home back a terrorist, while the killing of a refugee by a settler is treated as self-defence. They told us that the Palestinians did not take anything from Israel and that Israel must give back some of what it took. They warned that whoever aides and abets criminals sought by the International Criminal Court is a criminal too. They exposed the ugly apartheid that turned the lives of five million Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank into a living hell. They called for the rivers of blood in Gaza to stop.
Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset (1999-2003), Israel’s Parliament, and a former chairman of the Jewish Agency wrote a long article in 2003, titled “The End of Zionism”. Here are snippets:
“The Israeli nation today rests on a foundation of oppression and injustice… A state lacking justice cannot survive… There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew… It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers… We love the entire land of our forefathers… But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.”
Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak, said in an old interview for the documentary Four Corners broadcast on 11 March 2024 on ABC TV that if he had been born a Palestinian, he would have joined “one of the terror organisations.”
Nana and I attended a play the other day. A Jewish family in Florida played host to a Jewish family from Jerusalem. When the Israeli man brought up October 7th, the Florida woman screamed: “But what about October 6th?” Yes, what about the seventy-seven years of dispossession, humiliation, ethnic cleansing, and killing of Palestinians with American bombs? What about the six million refugees who live in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) camps? When the UN Secretary General, Guterres, said: “October 7th did not happen in a vacuum”, demands by far-right Israelis and Americans for his resignation became deafening.
I want you to know that I defend Jews, totally and completely. The two most important men in my life, aside from my own father, were Jews. Both were at University of Pennsylvania when I was a student there:
– Professor Shalom Goitein:
He was Chairman of the Oriental Studies Department at Penn and simultaneously at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He allowed me to teach Arabic, effectively financing my studies.
– Professor David Solomons:
He was my academic supervisor. He was like a father figure to me. Years later, when I returned from New York to Philadelphia to work for Philadelphia National Bank, his daughter, Jane, used to babysit your dad.
I am against those who refuse to share the Holy Land, against the extremist who wants the entirety of Palestine exclusively, and against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from Palestine. Yes, Jews lived in Palestine one time, but that was more than 1,900 years ago before the Roman Emperor Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem and evicted them in the year 135 AD, during the second Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire in sixty years.
It is noteworthy that in 1291, it was the Muslim Saladin who allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem to settle following his defeat of the Crusades. Also, in 1492, it was the Muslim Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid-II, who allowed Jews driven out from Spain and Portugal to settle in Ottoman territories.
Does historical antiquity establish a claim today to exclusively own Palestine? The answer is no.
I am baffled why far-right Zionists refuse to share Palestine with the peoples who protected them over the centuries. Islam venerates Judaism. Islam is the religion of Abraham. The Qur’an mentions Abraham glowingly dozens of times, more than any person other than Moses. Arabs are not anti-Semitic. How can they? Arabs are Semitic. Arabs and Jews are Biblical cousins, going back to Isma’il (Ishmael), the son of Abraham by the Egyptian slave woman Hagar, and Ishaq (Isaac), the son of Abraham with Sarah. The blood of Jesus is between Jews and Christians, not Jews and Muslims. The Holocaust took place in Europe, not in the Arab world. In 1917, a third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish.
Arabs are bewildered as to why Zionism rewarded them with destruction, occupation, and humiliation. In provoking the enmity of Arabs and Muslims, Zionism has harmed the long-term interest of the Jewish people. The safety and prosperity of Jews in the Muslim World require Israel to become a good neighbour through sharing Palestine with its original inhabitants, not through cement walls and iron curtains.
Should you be interested in non-AIPAC propaganda, please read my article titled: “For a Durable Solution in the Holy Land, De-politicize the Bible and the Quran“.
All my love,
Grandpa