Read the BBC’s news coverage and you will get the strong impression that in arresting – with a view to deporting – the green card-holding Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia University’s top pro-Palestine ringleader, the Trump administration is preying on an innocent student for simply having exercised his right to free speech and political liberty on the Columbia campus last year. You would also get the impression it is doing so because of Islamophobia, racism and – of course – the unseen tentacles of the “Israel lobby”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the administration will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of those it deems to be Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported. For added clarity, house speaker Mike Johnson responded to a reporter’s question about the deportation. “I went to face down the angry mob at Columbia at the height of that stuff… and it was dangerous,” said Johnson. “I met with Jewish students who were hauled away off campus because they were instructed not to come to class for fear of their physical safety.” Indeed.
Of course the administration cannot and should not deport US citizens, only foreign nationals. Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian who acted as spokesman for the Columbia protesters, deserves to be deported, along with the many hundreds if not thousands of his compadres who have devoted and continue to devote themselves to making American college campuses – and American cities more broadly – hell on earth for Jews.
Carrying out the mission to deport “Hamas supporters in America”, as Rubio describes them, is not just about sending a clear message to would-be arrivals on American shores that violent anti-Semites, under the guise of anti-Zionists or not, are not welcome. It is essential if the Enlightenment values and ideas on which America and the free world are built are to be saved. Having enabled the dramatic transformation in human thriving and civilisation seen over the last few hundred years, the all-important legacy of the Enlightenment – whose apotheosis is the United States – is in terrible, speedy decline.
The protesters make themselves quite clear. Khalil acted as spokesperson for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organisation behind the Columbia protests, which has stated on Instagram that it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilisation”.
As Richard Landes, a leading historian of the Palestinian terror and jihadi movement, argues in his brilliant book Can the Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism and Global Jihad, the zest for the “terror and the slaughter of Jews” makes Israel a “major battlefield” in the “global war” between Medieval forces of darkness and Western, Enlightenment-cradled democratic civilisation.
So let us make no mistake: last year’s widespread whipping up of hatred against Jews on campuses was a clear example of that global war. Deporting those architects of it who can be deported is a very important measure. There is a clear difference between free speech and persecution.
Lest we minimise what actually happened, let us look at the testimony of one among many mothers of Jewish students on campuses from Columbia to UCLA.
“We had to move our kids out of the campuses,” wrote Miha Schwartzenberg on X last week. “Not just because of the protests and tents and blocking their access to… everywhere in campus – but because of the constant death threats, very dangerous and disgusting physical gestures, shouting and banging on their dorm doors, day and night, stupid… jokes, violating their privacy in the [common] bathrooms… [swastikas] and sick writings on their walls, class disrupted freestyle, calling them humiliating names while in class and so on. Not one faculty member or anyone in the administration of these Universities did something, anything, to protect our children. Most of the Jewish students literally locked themselves in dorms, those who were lucky to share the room with a sane student. But those who had [pro-Palestine] room-mates had to move out, while we paid not just for the school, but for the dorms as well. It was the worst student year any Jewish/Israeli ever imagined.”
For many news outlets, such horror doesn’t even merit any comment whatsoever. In the BBC report, the Jewish experience is solely represented by “Carly, a Jewish-American graduate student and a friend of Mr Khalil” who “told the BBC that [he] was a ‘very, very caring soul”’. It’s sick.
The university staff who did nothing to restore order to their campuses are also quoted at length, for instance Columbia Professor Michael Thaddeus: “We’re facing a horrifying reality that our own student, a member of the Columbia community, has become a political prisoner here in the United States”.
Of course, as with much that comes out of the Trump administration, the talk is talked but the walk doesn’t necessarily follow. This single attempt at deportation is already being blocked as court proceedings get underway and Khalil’s army of lawyers argue the arrest is unconstitutional. The case may cost millions.
It is unclear whether Trump’s people have gone about the Khalil detention with sufficient care to actually carry through the deportation; as likely as not Khalil’s lawyers will win and he will stay.
The deportation of all the green-card holders who foment pro-Hamas activity would easily cost a trillion dollars in legal fees on the basis that each would cost as much as this one, though once precedent is established things might either speed up or grind to a halt. In any case it would be money well spent. We have to hope that America can be saved from its terror-endorsing lovers of murder and mayhem, one by one. The alternative is too all-encompassing and dark to imagine.
