By The public demand was for the University of Michigan to pull its money out of Israel. In private, federal prosecutors say, one activist had something more personal in mind. Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, then a medical student, allegedly told another activist he wanted to become a university official’s doctor so he could “poison her ass slowly.” In the same exchange, the two discussed going after officials’ children, according to The Detroit Metro Times.
Korkaya is one of 12 people now charged in a federal case that reaches from the Ann Arbor campus to the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. Eight defendants were named in an indictment unsealed in June. On October 30, federal prosecutors announced charges against four more. They allege that after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, activists set out to force the university and private businesses to cut ties with Israel by making officials and their families afraid of what would happen if they refused. All 12 defendants are presumed innocent.
The indictment describes what that pressure allegedly looked like at home. Prosecutors say participants looked up private addresses, watched their targets, smashed windows and threw glass jars filled with foul-smelling chemicals into family homes. At a regent’s house, protesters left mock corpses on the lawn. Elsewhere, participants allegedly painted inverted red triangles, a symbol Hamas uses to mark targets. Then came the photographs. Prosecutors say the group posted images of the damage online so the next official weighing a divestment demand could see what had happened to the last one.
Korkaya’s alleged remarks have a disturbing parallel in Australia. In February 2025, two nurses on duty at a Sydney hospital spoke by video with an Israeli man who asked what would happen if an Israeli patient came in for treatment. “I won’t treat them, I will kill them,” Sarah Abu Lebdeh allegedly replied. Her colleague, Ahmad Rashad Nadir, suggested he had already sent Israeli patients to hell. Police found no evidence that either nurse had harmed a patient. Both lost their jobs and pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the exchange.
Violence committed in the name of the pro-Palestinian cause has also reached Americans whose only public act was to ask for hostages to come home. In Boulder, Colorado, Mohamed Sabry Soliman shouted “Free Palestine” as he hurled two lit Molotov cocktails at people taking part in a weekly walk for the hostages held in Gaza. One victim died and a dozen others were injured. On October 29, the day before prosecutors announced the expanded Michigan indictment, Soliman pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes. He was already serving a life sentence for murder.
Michigan Democrats had a chance to confront the left’s antisemitism problem two years ago, when their own attorney general raised it. Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused Attorney General Dana Nessel of applying a different standard when she brought charges over a campus encampment. Tlaib did not mention Nessel’s Jewish faith. Nessel nevertheless believed the implication was clear and called it antisemitic. Asked about it on CNN, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer initially declined to take sides. The next day, she said publicly that suggesting Nessel based charging decisions on her religion was antisemitic.
The federal case now presents Michigan’s liberal leaders with a more concrete question. University regents could at least cast a vote on divestment. Their children had no vote. Neither did the families served by Detroit’s Jewish Federation. What did the people who picked those targets expect a Jewish family in Michigan to do about a war in Gaza?
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