Palestinian and human rights activist and longtime White River Junction resident Mohsen Mahdawi will take part in a morning-long conversation with David Bisno, a veteran study leader at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth College on Saturday, Dec. 20.
The “Conversation with Mohsen Mahdawi,” which had previously been slated to take place in Filene Auditorium at Moore Hall on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, has been moved to Auditorium E at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. Mahdawi’s talk with Bisno is scheduled to run from 9:30 a.m. until noon.
During an appearance for a scheduled U.S. citizenship interview in Colchester in April, Mahdawi was handcuffed and taken away by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. After 16 days in detention at a Vermont men’s correctional facility in Swanton, Mahdawi was freed from federal custody following a decision on his behalf by a judge with the U.S. District Court for Vermont in Burlington. Mahdawi is presently continuing graduate studies at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs while awaiting a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in New York on a Sept. 30 appeal by the federal authorities seeking to return him to federal detention while deportation proceedings for the Palestinian human rights activist continue before the U.S. Immigration Court.
Bisno is a retired ophthalmic surgeon who, for the past 32 years, has been teaching on a myriad of topics through Osher programs at Dartmouth, across the country, and overseas. Bisno first met Mahdawi 11 years ago, when the human rights activist was working as a teller at a bank in Hanover. Noting that the affable bank employee was not from the U.S., Bisno asked him where he was from. Mahdawi replied that he was from one of the most dangerous places in the world – Palestine. A legal resident of the U.S., Mahdawi was born in a third-generation refugee camp near Ramallah on the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
For more on this, please see our Dec 11 edition of trhe Vermont Standard.
