The First Amendment and your feelings

“The Department of Homeland Security found no evidence that Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements that showed support for a terrorist organization, according to a State Department memo discussed in federal court in Boston Friday.

The contents of the memo came out during the last day of witness testimony in a lawsuit brought by higher education organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, over the Trump administration’s policies of arresting and detaining international students and others engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. 

Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested in late March on a street in Massachusetts. Federal authorities are seeking her deportation. Her attorneys argue she was targeted solely for an op-ed she co-wrote in support of Palestinians in the Tufts student newspaper. There is no evidence that she is violent, advocates violence or otherwise was a threat to America or Americans.

“On Friday, Conlon pressed Armstrong [top official in the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs] about the reasons behind the revocation of Öztürk’s visa, given that DHS did not find evidence linking her to terrorist groups. 

“Armstrong testified his reasons extended beyond the op-ed Öztürk co-wrote in the student newspaper calling on Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel to include “actions” such as protesting Tufts’ relationship with Israel, which he asserted “are not speech.” 

 

“He also alleged she was associated with Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, which he said created a “hostile environment for Jewish students” on the Tufts campus.”

OK, so I’m a geneticist. Not only in speech but in actions, as I’ve practiced genetics for 40 years. And I could claim, with similar justification, that the fact that there are churches around here that have ties to creationism creates a hostile environment for geneticists.

Yes, I know as someone who the Nazis would have considered oven-fodder that lots of Jews died in the Holocaust. But you know what? Geneticists died under Stalin:

  • Nikolai Vavilov: A renowned Soviet geneticist and botanist, and a leading figure in early Soviet genetics. He was arrested in 1940, accused of being a spy, and died of starvation in a gulag in 1943.

  • Isaak Agol: A geneticist executed as part of the campaign against "bourgeois pseudoscience".

  • Solomon Levit: Director of the Moscow Medical Genetics Research Institute, he was executed following the suppression of genetics in the late 1930s.

  • Grigorii Levitskii: A geneticist who was among those executed during this period.

 

  • Georgii Karpechenko: A prominent geneticist who was executed.

 

  • Georgii Nadson: Another geneticist who died as a result of the repression. 

These are just a few examples. It is estimated that over 3,000 biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed for opposing Lysenkoism and defending genetics. The impact of these actions effectively destroyed genetics research and teaching in the Soviet Union for many years. Lysenkoism, with Stalin's backing, deemed Mendelian genetics "bourgeois" and "fascist", leading to the persecution of those who adhered to it. 

 

I’m not trying to say that the persecution of geneticists is numerically equivalent to the enormity of the Holocaust. I’m saying that in a free society, we have to tolerate speech we abhor. Like the white supremacists that Trump pardons and entertains at Mar-A-Lago. 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/18/metro/ozturk-visa-revocation-no-links-to-terrorism-antisemitism/

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