When Rümeysa Öztürk, a 27-year-old Turkish student, was snatched off the street by masked plainclothes police officers and put in the back of an unmarked car, she wasn’t marching on the streets of Istanbul protesting Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She was walking in America in broad daylight, about to meet friends for dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts. Ozturk’s “crime,” so far as anyone can make out, is to have co-authored in March 2024 an op-ed in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts University’s unwillingness to divest from companies with ties to Israel. After the article’s publication, Rümeysa Öztürk’s name and photo were published on the website Canary Mission, which documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.”
The War on Foreign Students
