'Free speech for me, but not for thee'

March 12, 2025

The mountain beyond the mountains (2017) Mt. Tahoma, aka Mt. Rainier

Donald Trump’s abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

One of the great things about going to college is you can learn all sorts of things that occur beyond the curriculum.

That happened to me, and thousands of other Washington State University students, in 1978. A small but well organized group—the Committee to Support South African Freedom (COMSAF)—initiated what seemed, at first, like a hopeless crusade to persuade the WSU regents to divest the college’s investments in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.

COMSAF was well thought-out though. Its leaders included foreign students—among them the son of Dr. Nthato Motlana, a Soweto activist who would become the personal physician to Nelson Mandela after Mandela was released from the Robben Island prison in 1990. COMSAF organized teach-ins, won support from the school’s faculty senate, the student association and at least one outspoken regent. Their solidly researched activism fueled large demonstrations, including one that packed hundreds of chanting students into the university’s administration building. I covered all this for the Daily Evergreen, the WSU student newspaper. The protest inside the administration building was intense as was the pressure the movement put upon the WSU president, Glenn Terrell, and the university’s board of regents.

I couldn’t help but be reminded about COMSAF’s activists when I learned about the case of Mahmoud Khalil this weekend.

Khalil has been one of the leaders and negotiators for the organized demonstrations at Columbia University protesting the Israeli assault on non-combatants in Gaza. A 30 year-old graduate student who obtained his master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Khalil has a green card that confers permanent resident status. He has been living along with his American wife (she is eight months pregnant with their first child) in student housing at Columbia. According to the New York Times, Khalil was with his wife when he was arrested by plain-clothed federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the two returned to their home Saturday evening. The agents reportedly told him his student visa had been revoked. But when Khalil replied that he had permanent resident status the agents persisted, telling him his green card had been revoked. Once in custody Khalil was quickly transported by aircraft to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he remains, as of this morning.

Of course, it’s difficult to evaluate Khalil’s activism outside the full sweep of the Israeli/Gaza tragedy—the savagery of the Hamas terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival 17 months ago, followed by the horrific deprivation and bombardment of Gaza (with U.S. bombs and other munitions) by the Israeli Defense Force. With more than 40,000 Palestinian civilians killed, approximately a quarter of whom were children, the international human rights organization Amnesty International has declared it a genocide.

Police line at a Columbia University protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza last year

In part because the Columbia demonstrations were so large and so visible in the New York media environment, the reactions to the protests drew national attention long before Donald Trump’s election in November. Because of his success as an organizer Khalil has been criticized not just for fomenting anti-semitism, but for allegedly supporting Hamas.

This a construction—glibly equating Khalil’s protest of Israel’s bombardments of Gaza with support for Hamas terrorism—that requires every American’s attention. We’ve seen time and again how Trump spews deprecation and targets people who dissent from his views, including his persistent attacks on the press as “enemies of the people.” Yet, ramping up the targeting is precisely what Trump has in mind for his critics, and critics of U.S. policy under his command. While I’m sure he would prefer to silence his critics via mere intimidation, he’s willing to back it up by using the powers of his office, even if the peremptory use of the power is unconstitutional. In that context, it is no surprise that Trump—a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—issued an over-the-top condemnation of Mahmoud Kahlil.

In a social media post Monday, Trump wrote this: “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.” [emphasis added]

It is the arrest part that takes a hammer to the First Amendment.

So far as I can discern, there’s no evidence that Khalil is a member or takes direction from Hamas. There is only the inference that his organizing of the protests and condemnation of the carnage in Gaza may be construed as supportive of Hamas. By Trump’s definition, any criticism of Israel or Zionism could be similarly construed as grounds for persecution and, in the case of vulnerable foreign visitors, deportation.

This happens in the same lava lamp of hypocrisy whereupon Trump, in August 2017, dismissed right-wing, tiki-torch carrying racists marching through Charlottesville—chanting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us!”—as part of the “good people on both sides.” (Heather Heyer, a 32 year-old woman peacefully protesting the torch-carrying bigots was fatally injured when an admitted white supremacist and admirer of Adolf Hitler—22 year-old James Alex Fields, Jr.—deliberately drove his vehicle at high speed into a crowd of counter-protestors with the admitted intent to kill them.)

By Trump’s logic, there would be nothing to stop the next president from ordering ICE to arrest and deport a green card holder who defends the Russian invasion of Ukraine, given that Russia is led by Trump’s apparent role model, Vladimir Putin, who faces war crime charges from the International Criminal Court for his actions against Ukrainian civilians.

“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American. The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the U.S. and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: The First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate. The government must immediately return Mr. Khalil to New York, release him back to his family, and reverse course on this discriminatory policy.”

—Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, on the arrest of Mahmoud Kahlil.

We’ve come a long way, very quickly, from the litany of complaints from right-leaning broadcasters and pundits about a plague of “cancel culture” upon those who write and speak outside the lines of political correctness. That seems like a child’s game of jacks now, given Trump’s purging of the Justice Department in order to use it as a cudgel against those he perceives as a threat to him and his allies.

Just last week, for example, Trump signed an executive order condemning the Pacific Northwest-based law firm—Perkins Coie (at one time the bond counsel for the City of Spokane)—for “dishonest and dangerous activity.”

To continue reading today’s post, please become a paid subscriber to The Daily Rhubarb at the above link.—tjc

—tjc