Can we finally get honest and brave intellectuals who are willing to say that the United States has been a military dictatorship for the last 25 years?

Can we finally get honest and brave intellectuals who are willing to say that the United States has been a military dictatorship for the last 25 years?

March 11, 2025

I hope you, dear readers, will be forgiving of me if I speak frankly about my immediate emotional response to an article that I read in Zeteo today.

Specifically, I want to draw attention to the interview with the former professor of Columbia University Katherine Franke who is interviewed in the article. Professor Franke resigned from Columbia University because of the constant harassment that she suffered for supporting the right of students to protest against Israel.

I fully support her defense of Columbia’s students and her sincere effort to assure that freedom of speech is protected. I feel that she was unfairly treated by Columbia University and that we must demand justice.

But, at the same time, I wanted to ask her why she has not, nor has a single academic in the United States, spoken out publicly about my case.

I do not have her contact information, or for that matter the contact information of Prem Thakker who conducted the interview. Instead, I will address everyone here in the open and I hope that both Katherine Franke and Prem Thakker will respond.

To start with, although my case has never been addressed by a single academic in a public format in the last twenty-five years, although it has never been covered by any media source (including the alternative media and conspiracy media) the case is extremely well known among academics in the United States, and think there is zero chance that Professor Franke was unaware of what was done to me.

In my case, it was case that was quite different from being pressured to leave the university after a successful career by the abuse and harassment of students and colleagues.

In my case, after I made an entirely transparent and public proposal for how the United States could establish a peaceful community with the nations of Northeast Asia, specifically Japan, China, and the Koreas, I earned the ire of various military contractors who wished to continue the demonization of Asia and to promote the militarization of all relations of the United States with that region.

I was punished for my sin of advocating for peace by being falsely accused of mental illness using fabricated documents in February, 2001. I was forced to take a two-year medical leave for a non-existent illness (subject to constant death threats, as were those around me), placed under literal house arrest for that period of time, and finally dismissed by the University of Illinois for “insufficient research productivity” with no justification. I was unable to find any employment in the United States thereafter. After working for two years at the Korean Embassy in Washington DC, I had no choice but to move to Korea to try to find some sort of career.

None of that would have happened if a military dictatorship had not been set up in the United States from December, 2000.

My case is one of the most egregious examples of explicit political persecution of an intellectual in recent American history and as I write to you from Japan, that continues to this day. Moreover, there were many others who were forced out of the country, or who even paid for their efforts with their lives, in the fight to oppose totalitarian governance under the Bush administration. Those brave souls also have never been recognized by Professor Franke and other limited-hangout Democracy Now guests. I myself do not know the full stories of others who have suffered because the information has been suppressed.

I hold that the failure to speak openly about the horrific persecution of so many Americans whose cases are declared to have “never happened” by cowardly intellectuals in the United States is the primary reason that human rights have reached this nadir in America today.

I have great respect for how Professor Franke defended students protesting the Gaza genocide. Yet at the same time, we must wonder whether she would have defended students at Columbia University demanding an investigation into the 9.11 incident. Or perhaps there are parts of the US-Israel complex that can, and cannot, be discussed by the protesters.

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ZETEO

‘Columbia Is Doing the Bidding of Israel, and Trump’ - Says Former Professor

Katherine Franke and Prem Thakker discuss the suppression of free speech on college campuses, plus the latest student protests and arrests at Columbia and Barnard.

PREM THAKKER

March 10, 2025

On Friday, Trump pulled a massive $400 million of federal funding from Columbia University, citing the university’s alleged harassment of Jewish students. This comes despite the university’s repeated crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, including the violent suppression of student protesters, and most recently, the pushing out of their very own professors.

In an exclusive Zeteo Town Hall, Ex-Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke joined Zeteo Political Correspondent Prem Thakker to discuss how she was pushed out by the university after standing up for pro-Palestine students and how free speech continues to be suppressed on campus.

“What happened to me is not about me,” Franke tells Prem. “What happened to me is a system. It's a systematic way in which universities have been deployed as a test case to see how we are going to punish and terrify people who speak out on particular issues.”

Last year, Professor Franke raised concerns on “Democracy Now!” about some Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service,” after a few Israeli students – who had recently served in the Israeli military – allegedly sprayed student protesters with a smelly substance.

“I mentioned on the show that there had been a pattern of this problem of students who were pro-Palestinian experiencing serious harassment from students who were pro-Israeli, and that the university basically hadn't done anything about it,” Franke tells Prem.

After her comments, two of Professor Franke’s colleagues filed a complaint against her at the university, accusing her of being anti-Israeli.

“I had colleagues screaming things at me about how I've supported Hamas, that I didn't care that there were anti-Semitic attacks against these colleagues, children, or their families – which of course isn’t true,” Franke tells Prem. “…I just thought, ‘I don't know how I can be part of this community anymore.’ ”