She Used to Speak to Congress About Oppression. Yesterday, She Attacked a Jew for Speaking Out About Iran.
Campus police detain Temulun Togochog after the attack at the University of Michigan, November 1, 2026. Footage: Cam Higby.
“I should’ve f***ing killed you when I had the chance.” That is what a University of Michigan student screamed at a Jewish woman on November 1 as campus police dragged her off the Ann Arbor quad, moments after she had shoved the woman to the ground and kicked her.
Two years ago, the same student sat before Congress. In December 2024, a seventeen-year-old Temulun Togochog asked a congressional commission to act against the “systematic oppression” of six million Southern Mongolians by the Chinese Communist Party. Her parents had fled China, and she said she hoped one day to return with them to a homeland she had never seen.
The woman she attacked was Liz Benichou, a Jewish conservative commentator who had come to speak at a free-speech event, and what set Togochog off was a question. Benichou looked at her, a young woman with a nose piercing and bare arms, and asked what would happen to her if she walked around like that in Iran. That was the whole provocation: not a slur and not a shove, just a question about what the Islamic Republic does to women dressed the way Togochog was dressed.
Which oppression counts?
Togochog has built a public life on bearing witness to repression. She has spoken at the UN, at the International Religious Freedom Summit, and at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and she knows what a regime that erases a people looks like because she has described one under oath.
So she knows exactly what Iran does to women, from the morality police to the ones beaten to death over a loose headscarf, and when a Jewish woman said it out loud, her answer was to put that woman on the ground and tell her she should have been killed.
This is the ideology that now runs the campus left, and it is not complicated. Oppression by China is a cause worth testifying about, while oppression by Iran, by Hamas, or by any regime that hates Israel is off-limits, and whoever mentions it becomes the enemy. A Jewish woman pointing at the Islamic Republic is not treated as a fellow witness but as a target.
Michigan police took Togochog into custody, processed her, and released her that evening pending warrant authorization, and the university administration has not said a word.
What the university looks away from
This is the University of Michigan, which has taken in $618.5 million in foreign money since 2015, including $66.7 million from China, and which has been under federal investigation since July 2025 for reporting tens of millions of those dollars late and labeling foreign-government funders as “nongovernmental.” It is the same school whose laboratories were the destination for Chinese nationals charged with smuggling biological materials into the country. A university that cannot say where its money came from is not going to say what its students have become.
And the problem is not confined to the left. In March, the podcaster Myron Gaines came to Ohio University, greeted students with a Nazi salute, announced that “Jews control America,” told a Jewish student that the Holocaust killed “271,000 at best,” and cut him off with “Hold on one sec, Jew.” The university said it was “not legally permitted to prohibit free speech” and left it at that. For the past year, Hasbara Fellows have been filming what Jewish students hear at events like these, and what they hear is “F*** Israel” screamed in their faces on the quad in broad daylight.
From the far left comes a human-rights activist who testified before Congress, and from the far right a podcaster with a Nazi salute, carrying different flags toward the same target. At one university the administrators explain why they can do nothing, and at the other they say nothing at all.
