Detained in the United States as in dictatorships

Last Tuesday, Rumeysa Otzurk, a Turkish student, was detained on the street by plainclothes U.S. federal agents, who handcuffed her on the spot and put her in an unmarked police car. Her "crime" was co-authoring an article critical of Israel in the university newspaper.

I know there's nothing more to the daily catalogue of horrors, and that there are harsher stories, like those told by the Russian deserter to Francesc Millan in the interview published yesterday by ARA. But the images of the student's arrest, recorded by a security camera, shouldn't be very different from those of the GDR's Stasi or Franco's grays persecuting dissidents. Except those were dictatorships. Where there is no freedom of expression or demonstration, and there is fear of speaking publicly against the government's positions, there is a dictatorship.

The arrest of Rumeysa Otzurk is an abuse of power, a perversion of the law, a witch hunt, a warning to sailors, the denial of what the United States has always prided itself on: critical thinking, asking questions, and debating ideas, which are the values on which it is least Soviet.

Facts are important, even if social media and rhetoric would have us believe they are no longer. Today, university students and professors who criticize Israel and universities that fail to demonstrate sufficient obedience are persecuted. Tomorrow, it will be any other citizen who criticizes the invasion of Greenland or the supreme leader of the white nationalist restoration.