We are now living in a police state. That should be evident to anyone who has seen the video footage of the recent arrest of a woman by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) officers. You can see the video on YouTube. That clip should horrify all of us, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, progressive, or MAGA.

In the video we see what appears to be an ordinary woman walking down a city street, alone, looking at her phone. She is stopped at first by one, and then several figures. Most of them are dressed in black from head to foot, and their faces are covered. She screams in fear, but in a few seconds she is surrounded, handcuffed and led to a big black SUV. She has since been whisked away to somewhere in Louisiana.

I have a lot of questions about this arrest and the way it was carried out. Why was this person taken on the street, by surprise? Was ICE afraid of a shootout if they knocked on the door at her home or office? Were they afraid she might set off a bomb if they didn’t ambush her? Why didn’t they just notify her by mail and give her a chance to find a lawyer and turn herself in? Was she some sort of international criminal ringleader who might slip away to a secret hideout? Beyond all that, what crime was she suspected of committing?

The woman being taken to the waiting SUV is a graduate student of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, named Rumeysa Öztürk. She is a legal resident, a citizen of our NATO ally Turkey. She has committed no crime. Ms. Öztürk was arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s phony war on anti-Semitism.  According to ICE, Öztürk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”

The idea that Öztürk is a Hamas sympathizer apparently originates in a rightwing vigilante website called Canary Mission, which in turn based its claim on an article Öztürk co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper last year. That article bears the incendiary headline, “Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU [Tufts Community Union] Senate resolutions.”

The article makes a reasoned argument for Tufts to take a principled stand and to adopt the recommendations of its own faculty, staff, and student body to oppose Israeli military actions in the Gaza strip against Palestinian civilians. You may or may not agree with the article’s characterization of what the Israeli Defense Forces are doing to Palestinians. But I challenge you to read the editorial yourself and find in it an iota of antisemitism—or for that matter, an iota of hatred or prejudice against anyone. It makes no direct or indirect reference to Hamas.

But we are living in an authoritarian police state, and unfortunately for Ms. Öztürk, she embodies the confluence of several of its made-up demons: an immigrant, an intellectual, and a Palestinian sympathizer.

Don’t just take it from me. As the prominent Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina and author of The Origins of the Final Solution, concludes his essay in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, “Trump, Antisemitism & Academia”

It is utterly contradictory but hardly surprising for Trump to feign indignation over the harassment of Jewish students while openly advocating criminal violence against Palestinians. His campaign against campus antisemitism is simply a hypocritical pretext for his assault on American higher education.

This is shameful, and we should call it for what it is: state-sponsored terrorism.