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TWO IMMIGRANT FIRST AMENDMENT HEROES SEPARATED BY THREE CENTURIES  
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Dave Lindorff
March 31, 2025
ThisCantBeHappening!
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_ Rumeysa Ozturk and John Peter Zenger are book ends to the history
of the First Amendment — the one that guarantees freedom of speech,
association, religion, the right to petition for redress of grievances
and freedom of the press. _

, Engraving of Andrew Hamilton defending John Peter Zenger in court
– Public Domain

 

RUMEYSA OZTURK, a Turkish doctoral student in child psychology at
Tufts University in Medford, was standing alone on a sidewalk last
Tuesday when she was surrounded a gang of unidentified black-clad
assailants wearing black masks, Screaming in terror, the 30-year-old
woman had her wrists cuffed behind her back, and was spirited away to
an unmarked SUV even arrested, since her accostors weren’t even
sworn officers of the law — in an unmarked SUV, driven across
multiple state lines and brought to a number of government offices in
violation of a federal court order. Over a period of 24 hours, during
which she may not even have been offered any food, even though when
kidnapped she had been on her way to break the Ramadan fast with
friends, she was flown and driven without anyone’s knowledge and
dumped in a for-profit privately contracted detention cent in
Louisiana, where she now awaits potential deportation. In all that
frightening time she was never formally arrested, because the thugs
who hd grabbed her were not sworn law-enforcement officers.

Her “crime?” Committing journalism.

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Surveillance video shows Turkish student at Tufts University being
accosted by masked Homeland Security thugs who stuffed her in an
unmarked car and rendered her to a detention center in Louisiana with
intent to deeport her for writing qn

Although Ozturk has not been charged with anything, her student visa
has nonetheless been voided by a boastful Secretary of State Marco
Rubio, who claims an article she co-wrote (over a year ago!) in the
Tufts student paper shows she is a supporter of Hamas, is
“antisemitic” and “could interfere with US foreign
policy”—all patently absurd falsehoods.

Read the op-ed article she co-authored
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a _studen_t newspaper which is the whole basis for Rubio’s action.
If you, dear reader, can discover the remotest shred of evidence of
the authors’ supporting Hamas of being anti-semitic, much less a
threat to US foreign policy, pleas email Rubio, because he sure
hasn’t found it!

JOHN PETER ZENGER immigrated to New York from his native Germany in
1770 at the age of 13, where he was apprenticed to a New York printer
named William Bradford. He e stablished his own printing business
thirteen years later, printing his own news broadsheet, the _New York
Weekly Journal_ in 1733. A political publication it focused on
exposing the corruption of royally appointed Colonial Governor William
Cosby. When Cosby sued Zenger for the libel, the pioneering newsman
found himself locked away in jail for 10 months awaiting trial.

You may wonder why I am writing about Ozturk and Zenger together in
this article. My reason is to point out that Ozturk and Zenger are
book ends to the history of the First Amendment — the one that
guarantees freedom of speech, association, religion, the right to
petition for redress of grievances and freedom of the press.

Zenger, even before the “shot heard round the world” that in
Lexington Massachusetts on April 19, 1775 launched the American
Revolution and among other things, laid down a marker asserting
freedom of the press in the 13 British colonies. He did this by
convincing a jury of the truth of his articles and having all charges
dropped. It was the first case of freedom of the press to speak truth
to power. The closely watched court case played an important role in
enshrining freedom of in the press in the US Constitution as that
founding document’s First Amendment of 10 that became known
collectively as the Bill of Rights, becoming the only profession to
specifically have its freedom expressly protecteded.

Generations of journalists have learned about Zenger, who at any point
could have sought some compromise to get out of jail and back to his
printing business if not his newspaper. Instead, despite his having
spent almost a year in jail, he chose to risk it all and have his case
against the most powerful political figure in the colony of New York
put to a jury of his peers. That jury, ignoring the rulings of the
judge on the case, unanimously threw out the charges against Zenger in
an early, example of jury nullification. In doing so, Zenger and those
jurors established the principle in what would soon become the United
States of America that truth is a powerful defense against libel and
that the press must be free to report the truth.

It’s a lesson nobody apparently taught to Amazon founder and
billionaire businessman and media baron Jeff Bezos as a student (or if
a teacher did try did try, Bezos was too busy planning how to make
money to pay attention). Otherwise, how could he have just announced a
few weeks ago that his publication, the once proudly
independent _Washington Post_, would no longer publish opinions
critical of President Trump and how could he have banned a staff
artist’s political cartoon depicting a group of[ of billionaires,
including himself, genuflecting before a stern President Trump. (The
cartoonist resigned.)

As for that current hero Ozturk, her detention ordeal is not over,
though a federal judge has at least temporarily ruled that she cannot
be moved or deported by the Trump administration’s agents until she
rules on whether a federal court should have jurisdiction over her
fate, and not Homeland Security or any other office operating under
the authority of President Trump.

Ozturk had the courage to co-author, along with three other students,
an op-ed article over a year ago on March 4, 2024, in the Tufts’
student paper calling on the University President to adopt three
resolutions voted by the Tufts Community Senate. These articles called
for for the university to condemn Israel for committing probable
genocide in Gaza, for it to disclose the names of companies in the
University’s investment portfolio that are Israeli or that do
business with Israel, and for it to divest its portfolio of those
holdings.

That student opinion article was provided to the US State Department
by a zionist organization, Canary Mission, which claims its objective
is to “fight hatred of Jews on campuses.” The group singled out
Ozturk as author and put her photo on its website alleging that in
writing the op-ed she had “engaged in anti-Israeli activism in March
2024." “

Her “activism,” that is to say, consisted of co-authoring an
article for a newspaper—a fundamental freedom described clearly and
unambiguously in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he revoked Ms. Ozturk’s
student visa for what she wrote, which is why she is now being
detained and is facing deportation.

It is critical that she and some 300 other students whose visas and
even green card permanent residency documents have been revoked on
similarly unconstitutional grounds by this man who loves to refer to
the US, as the “leader of the free world,” making himself, the
Trump administration, and sadly the entire United States, a
laughingstock.

Ozturk should be freed immediately or be brought before an honest
federal judge to hear the Trump government’s ludicrous case against
her. When that happens, I hope she and her attorney demand a jury
trial, so she can win the same sort of grand history-making jury
slap-down of tyrannical power that John Peter Zenger won three
centuries centuries ago.

_Dave Lindorff is the founder of ThisCantBeHappening.substack.com
[[link removed]], Izzy Award winner, writer
for Nation, FAIR, Salon, Business Week Asia correspondent, author of
"Spy for No Country: The story of Ted Hall, the teenage atomic spy who
may have saved the world"_

* First Amendment
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* Freedom of Speech
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* freedom of the press
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* immigrant rights
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* Rumeysa Ozturk
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* John Peter Zenger
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