The scene in the video of 25 March is a quiet street in Boston, Massachusetts. A woman wearing a burka and a white coat is confronted by one man, who is then joined by another. The men lift lanyards revealing law-enforcement badges over their jackets before more join, and the woman is cuffed and led off. She can be heard screaming.
Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. She is a PhD student at Tufts, 30 years old. She’s also Turkish national. Once footage of the arrest has been released, Secretary of State Marco Rubio makes a statement hinting that she’s been supporting Hamas (but provides no evidence). If that was the case, we plead, then why hasn’t the US government detained Rachel Zegler, star of the bombed-out Snow White remake, under anti-terrorism legislation?
The central “offence” here appears to be that Ms. Ozturk wrote an op-ed in the university’s newspaper in support of Palestine – which would make her just another deranged campus lunatic. Does this mean she deserves to be held in Louisiana awaiting deportation?
I don’t know Ms. Ozturk from Adam, and there’ll unlikely ever be circumstances when we share company: she’s a devout Muslim who was about to break her fast before she was collared – I like talking, a lot, about Don John of Austria obliterating 30,000 Ottomans and freeing 15,000 Christian slaves at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. But her situation is at once ridiculous, particularly in the light of January 20th’s “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” Executive Order.
There are few ways to explore this spectacle. First I’d recommend grievance.
Scams
In 2020, the BLM scam was unleashed, and spread with such remarkable speed that soon it would rival the climate, central banking, and lockdown scams. White people got hammered – not just in university newspaper op-eds, but in prime-time legacy media, and on network talk shows. White people were hammered by sports personalities, writers, actors, “health professionals”, businessmen, and HR leads. Companies like Forrester and McKinsey published op-eds or curious research (for which the latter has never released its sampling methodology) that hinted white people needed a kicking. There were marches with violent threats (“no justice, no peace”) and statues were toppled. Then came the British politicians and the South African editors.
Like all the others hissing, both of these groups happened to be white. They stood up, stuck their fingers in the air – monkeypox pustules clearly visible on their wrists – and declared: “whitey is problematic”. Parliaments and user forums became trophy hunting grounds, “inquiries” were quickly scrambled, white people unacceptably supportive of law enforcement got the sack and things like “hard work” and “punctuality” were quickly designated as inventions of white supremacy. Satisfied, the British politicians then went off to buy ketamine for their rent boys, or accidentally hang themselves whilst trying to self-pleasure on doors.
The grievance angle is: just before the British politician slamming whitey accidentally hung himself, or sold state secrets to Azerbaijan, it would have been nice to have seen him waterboarded. There were no black-site renditions back then – so why now? That was also a Trump administration – why didn’t we see people saying awful things about white people spirited into an El Salvador mini hell, or being subjected to a Zero Dark Thirty on the pavements of university towns?
Pragmatism
The second way I’d recommend exploring is pragmatism – with an urgent demand for clarity.
Either we share our ideas, however offensive they may be, or we do what the UK is considering – install “banter bouncers” outside bars and other public facilities to ensure that nobody comments on the curious relationship between the Prime Minister and an openly gay Muslim Peer. What we can’t have is selective evaluation.
This happens to be the position of editors with their monkeypox-ed hands declaring “hold-on-well-the-court-has-agreed-mister-Malema-is-just-singing-against-white-supremacy”, who then argue that the equally colourful responses to it, especially those emanating from white quarters, amount to “hate speech”.
In May 2021, a motorcade decorated with Palestinian flags drove through a number of predominately Jewish suburbs in North London with a loud speaker blaring: “F*ck the Jews, r*pe their daughters”. That was signal of intent: those men, bearded twenty-somethings dressed in tracksuits who probably worked in neon vape shops, articulated a desire to maim – and were already known to authorities as violent.
Ms. Ozturk made no such threats; at the time of writing claims that she has been scheming with Hamas remain unsupported and unlikely. But whereas nothing happened to those men (this is the UK after all), for ostensibly the non-crime of publishing nonsense in a university newspaper Ms. Ozturk now finds her prospects as a permanent “decolonisation” scholar or being appointed head of HR for Ben & Jerrys, severely diminished.
Charitable
There are reasons to be charitable to the Americans. Perhaps because of the girl bosses on their slay routines at Twitter, or because of the Biden administration’s deliberate harassment of free speech advocates and its evil censorship designs, or because of the mis or disinformation NGO-funded scams running adjacent to the legacy media, or because of the reluctance to prosecute high-profile officials for instigating a “global health crisis” and associated chaos…
America might just have got itself tangled up. This is especially embarrassing in light of Donald Trump’s threats to the UK – unless they start protecting expression, they are told, a favourable trade deal (or a suspension of the 10% tariff imposed on Wednesday) is off.
A refresher course in First Principles is therefore urgently sought, because the last thing anyone wants to be called is “hypocritical”. Especially by the British.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: Grok