EDITORIAL
Attacks on Protestors Prepare Future Wars

Mar 17, 2025

On March 8, Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student activist who took part in protests against the massacre in Gaza. The Trump administration is trying to deport him, even though he has not been accused of a crime and is a legal U.S. resident. Since then, agents have removed at least two more students. Trump promises these arrests are the first of many, that “agitators will be imprisoned/ or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.”

The Trump administration has also cut off 400 million dollars in funding for Columbia and published a list of 60 universities it is investigating. To get their 400 million back, the Trump administration told Columbia it would have to crack down on protest and a whole academic department it didn’t like. In response, on March 13, Columbia announced it was expelling some student protestors, and it even revoked the earned degrees of a few.

Like the Biden administration that pushed Columbia and other universities into smashing student protests and arresting protestors in the first place, Trump justifies all this by claiming that these protests constitute antisemitic attacks on Jewish students. It is undoubtedly true that some protestors cheered on Hamas, which carried out the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. But others were demonstrating to oppose U.S. involvement in the Israeli state’s massacre of Palestinians.

It is not antisemitic to criticize the murder of tens of thousands of people in Gaza. One of the first groups attacked as antisemitic for organizing protests was a group called Jewish Voice for Peace, which organizes Jewish people to support the rights of Palestinians. In fact, it is antisemitic to claim, as Trump does, that all Jews must identify with the bloody policies of the Israeli state!

No, these claims of antisemitism are just an excuse to justify attacking the right to speak out against war and massacre.

Students at places like Columbia might be from more privileged layers of the population, disconnected from the working class. But they have sometimes been the first to react to the outrage of war. They do not have the power to stop wars, but they have inspired others to act, including the working class which potentially has that power. The attack on these students is thus aimed at forcing the U.S. population into line behind the murderous war Israel has carried out for the last year and a half with U.S. support—and behind the wars to come.

Trump is not the first president to attack protestors or to arrest people for speaking out—especially against a war. During World War I, Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, was one among many jailed for saying the truth, that workers had no interest in that war. In the run-up to World War II, the government imprisoned members of the Socialist Workers Party for speaking out against war. During the McCarthy period after World War II, communists and those accused of being communists were run out of the universities and unions. Some were locked up, some deported—and others killed.

The repression was aimed well beyond those it directly targeted. It was aimed at scaring the whole population into falling in line behind the wars the U.S. state apparatus carried out in the interests of its capitalist class, whether against Germany, Japan, or Italy, or against nationalist struggles for independence in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Trump may be particularly crude. But behind Trump is a whole state apparatus, and a whole capitalist class served by that state apparatus. With this system sliding toward more and bigger wars, the U.S. state is looking to expand its control over resources and populations including by the threat of wars, or actual wars. Trump expresses this most bluntly in his demands to take over Canada and Greenland, to extort Ukraine’s mineral wealth, and in his trade wars against anyone and everyone.

War always means demanding sacrifices from the population and repressing those who organize against those sacrifices. And imperialist wars like those they are preparing rest on lies, trying to get workers to line up behind their own bosses, their own state, to fight against workers in other countries.

Workers have no interest in going along with any of this. The attack on the universities is part of a drive to get the whole population to fall into line. But the working class has the numbers and central place in the economy to give it the possibility to refuse being led quietly to the slaughter.