Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

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I am going to get downvoted and flagged because I will bring up a topic that is not to be discussed here:

From a similar CNN article:

"Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered her department to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, making good on a promise made last month when she demanded the university hand over detailed records on its international students’ “illegal and violent activities” before April 30 or face the loss of its certification."

Okay, who could they possibly be talking about? Right. The Gaza protesters.

Miriam Adelson - $150m donated to Trump, second highest

Elon Musk is not the only one that bought the White House. So there is a genocide that if any of us tech people had some courage we could easily make some pretty wild visualizations of the before/after of Gaza maps, and the current full scale ethnic cleansing of it, but we can't bring it up. We're failing as tech people on this, but so is the whole world.

It could be Gaza protesters sure but it could be anyone. Previously legal residents were deported for minor traffic violations.

They’re trying to hit some targets for deportation numbers and shipping home “criminal” foreign students is an easy win.

Of course it's about the Gaza protestors, let's not pretend otherwise.

No, it can't be anyone. Please don't do this. This is about the Palestinian situation. They tried to pressure the TikTok purchase so they change their algorithm to show less Gaza deaths. It is simply about that, and there is also a money trail of top donors that corroborate this. They also made a show of arresting the Columbia Palestinian organizer. They are not looking for illegal Mexicans in the Ivy League.

Authoritarian regimes aren't exactly known for going "ah, good, we've done enough oppression now!"

They're targeting everyone they can find. Russian refugees (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/science/russian-scientist...), Danish people who missed a form (https://www.mississippifreepress.org/ice-arrests-mississippi...), etc.

Yes, the Admin is even more pro-Israel (and by that I mean pro-Israeli gov/Netanyahu) than previous ones. But it's also using accusations of anti-Semitism at these universities as a cover to generally bring these "liberal" institutions to heel (as outlined in Project2025).

So it's not really about Gaza, Palestinians, or Jews. It's about control.

See this NY Times article from the other day:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritag...

Sure, but do you think that if nothing had ever happened in Gaza, the Trump administration wouldn't have found some other pretext to go after higher education, and foreign students in particular? They're defunding research programs all across the board and are sending people to gulags for having tattoos.

If you read the original list of demands[1],very few of the bullet points seems to be actually about the protests and anti-semitism, with the bulk of the demands involving DEI , reverse-DEI (i.e. more inclusion of white, conservative voices ) and greater federal control and oversight over Harvard's administration. If you read Harvards's response[2], you will see that the university is more than willing to co-operate on 'anti-semitism' and suppression of the protestors, but are pushing back against all the other items.

It seems that what is portrayed as a dispute over Palestine, antisemitism and qamas is actually a cover for a power-struggle between the liberals and conservatives ( such as the Heritage foundation, Project 2025, and Yarvinites)

[1] - https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...

[2] - https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...

edit : But when i think of it more, maybe it is about Israel and Zionism but over a longer time-scale than recent events. If you look at some of the early anti-'woke' and anti-left movements like the self-proclaimed 'Intellectual dark web', lot of them are zionists who viewed the growing liberal disenchantment with zionism in the college campus and left-wing activism (including pro-palestine activism like the BDS movement) as an existential threat to Israel.

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