In demonstrations at Columbia University and Trump Tower in New York City, as well as on the op-ed pages of liberal newspapers and websites, leftist anti-Zionists headed to the barricades this past week, both literally and figuratively. They did so on behalf of the new hero of the struggle to “free Palestine,” which means to destroy Israel.
They are not alone in rallying to the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Hamas and antisemitic mayhem that has gone on at Columbia since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. American liberals and many, if not most Democrats, are also all-in on the effort to free Khalil.
Khalil was arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, foreigners who come to the United States to study but use that privilege to advocate for a terror group and to engage in illegal activities, as well as fomenting hate against Jews, have forfeited that right. And so, at the government’s discretion, those persons will be deported.
Trump’s cultural revolution
For those opposed to the president’s policies across the board, he is as much a martyr to the “resistance” to the Trump administration as he is to the cause of eliminating the Jewish state.
To them, the president’s push to punish schools that tolerate antisemitism and to deport those terror-supporting foreign students who have helped drive the surge of hate against Jews on campuses throughout the United States is deeply offensive. They assert that Khalil’s arrest and potential deportation are evidence of Trump’s authoritarianism and willingness to trample on the right to free speech.
Yet even more than that, the credentialed elites that now form the backbone of the Democratic Party view Trump’s war on leftist-dominated colleges and universities that have enabled the surge in antisemitism as one that is directed at them and all they hold dear.
When Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria blasted the Trump campaign against these institutions of higher learning as a “cultural revolution,” he wasn’t entirely wrong.
What Trump is attempting isn’t a replay of the Chinese cultural revolution—a mad orgy of bloodletting in which Mao Tse-Tung and that country’s Communist Party waged war on all Western learning and all potential sources of internal opposition. What the administration hopes to do is quite the opposite of what that purveyor of liberal conventional wisdom claims.
Instead of destroying learning, the president is trying to rescue American education from “progressives” who have subverted it by imposing woke indoctrination throughout the system—from grades K-12 all the way up to the most elite universities. They may now pose as defenders of the “experts” against Trump’s revolt of the uneducated. But what the left is doing, with the support of their liberal fellow travelers, is part of an effort to undermine the entire edifice of Western civilization and the American republic. They’re doing that by seeking to replace the Western canon and its belief in equality with the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It is rooted in the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that preaches an endless race war between “people of color,” who are always victims, and the so-called white oppressor class.
Canaries in the coal mine
That the Jews and Israel have been falsely labeled as “white” and always in the wrong (let alone oppressors since Jews have suffered persecution for two millennia), and the Palestinian Arabs their victims who are always in the right, is incidental to the damage that woke ideology seeks to do to all Americans.
As is always the case, the Jews are the canaries in the coal mine. They saw themselves as at home in institutions where they have thrived for more than a century once the old quotas against Jewish admission were toppled. Now Jews are targeted by the progressives simply because—as the object of the world’s oldest hatred—they are uniquely vulnerable to be made to suffer for the sin of that success, both in the United States and in Israel.
In a less hyper-partisan era or one in which hatred for Trump was not so integral to political discourse, extremists like Khalil and his cheering section on the left would not only be isolated. Those who today call themselves liberals would realize how much of a threat the toxic ideas of progressives are to everything they cherish. They would understand that these radicals should not only be shunned but actively resisted. But so many political liberals have either embraced those ideas to stay in sync with political fashion on the left or have been indoctrinated in them in their own schooling. As a result, they instinctually identify with the notion that a foreign terror supporter is somehow the poster child for free speech.
The pro-Hamas mob’s goals
Khalil is the grandson of Arabs who fled what is now Israel when the war to destroy the newly established modern-day Jewish state in May 1948 failed. He was born in Syria but subsequently acquired Algerian citizenship. After being educated in Lebanon, he moved to the United States to seek a graduate degree via a student visa in 2022. While in America, he acquired a green card via marriage to a U.S. citizen. That enabled him not only to remain in the country legally but also to get a job. One job that he held was as a public affairs officer for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the Hamas-associated agency that helps perpetuate the conflict with Israel.
At Columbia, Khalil was one of the most visible organizers of the pro-Hamas demonstrations since Oct. 7 that included illegal encampments, in addition to takeovers of university buildings and libraries. While portrayed in liberal outlets as an expression of idealism by those who sympathized with suffering Palestinians, Khalil and those who joined him made no secret of their ideological goals. They are not peace activists. Their literature and chants made it clear that they supported Hamas, a terror organization that led the mass murder of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 251 others on Oct. 7. They explicitly supported terrorism, as even The New York Times reported.
That Khalil’s pregnant wife speaks about his being kidnapped by ICE and the cruelty of such an action remains deeply ironic since her husband and his confederates have no problem with the kidnapping of Israelis—not to mention the slaughter, rape and torture of those Jews whom they targeted on Oct. 7.
They did so because they supported its genocidal goal to purge the Jews from their ancient homeland (“from the river to the sea”) and their terroristic methods (“globalize the intifada”). Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that these “mostly peaceful” protests sometimes crossed over into violence and acts of intimidation that at times led some to advise Jews to flee the campus.
While politicians, including former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, praised them as idealists who should be “heard,” their goals made it obvious what was driving these protests.
Their takeover of parts of the campus made them virtual “no go” zones for Jews not willing to abjure their faith or their identification with their people. There should be no misunderstanding about this. Their effort to silence and shun Jews was not incidental to their purpose. It was integral to their protests and in keeping with the general woke intolerance for those who dissent against their ideology or can be smeared as members of the oppressor class.
Free-speech hypocrisy
Nor should we take seriously the loud clamor about Khalil’s arrest being a Trumpian campaign against free speech.
The same voices loudly clamoring on behalf of Khalil’s right to torment Jews and support an Islamist movement that is designated as a terror organization were silent during the years of the Biden presidency. That administration conducted an unprecedented campaign to silence dissent against their policies during the COVID pandemic, as well as those who opposed them on a host of other issues. They colluded with social-media platforms and Internet providers to squelch those who opposed them in a program of government censorship that was antithetical to democracy, despite their disingenuous claims to be defending it.
Biden’s Department of Justice similarly targeted dissent. They sought to crack down and intimidate parents who protested against the imposition of radical ideologies in their children’s schools, as well as those who conducted peaceful protests against abortion.
But liberals had no problem with these policies.
Some on the left, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) were explicit about abandoning their former stance in which they supported all those whose speech was under attack, be they on the right or the left. Now they only defend speech when it conforms to their political opinions and are happy to stand on the sidelines or support the suppression of conservative or other non-leftist views.
Some liberal Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, actively sought to participate in the repression. They did so ostensibly because they foolishly believed it would make Jews safer if outlier crackpots on the far right were silenced. But the real reason was that the group had long since abandoned its brief to defend Jewish life for a partisan agenda as a Democratic Party auxiliary.
Violence isn’t protected speech
Still, that raises the question as to whether conservatives are themselves free-speech hypocrites by supporting Trump’s plan to deport foreign Hamas supporters. It’s a fair question to pose, but the answer is that the accusation is false.
Khalil and other foreign supporters are not being deported for their opinions. Any American or, for that matter, foreign resident can think and say what they like, no matter how hateful or abhorrent. But Khalil and his mob of antisemitic leftists at Columbia—and others like them around the country—turned their support for the genocide of Jews into acts of harassment and violence, breaking not only the rules of the university where they worked and studied (albeit rules that a school administration that was tacitly in sympathy with the Israel-haters refused to enforce) but the law.
That rendered those among their number who were not citizens liable to be expelled from the United States under long-recognized rules and regulations. Foreign residents are in the United States only with the permission of the government. Even green-card holders can have that permission revoked if they violate the law or otherwise act in a manner that violates the terms under which they were admitted. And not only did Khalil violate them. It’s a dead certainty that he lied about his affiliations and intentions in order to gain entry to the United States and to get a green card even after he married a citizen.
Yet the point to focus on isn’t immigration law. Advocacy for Israel’s destruction is speech. The acts of violence and intimidation committed by the pro-Hamas mob Khalil led were not speech.
Foreign students take over
The more germane issue, however, isn’t really about the fate of Khalil or any of the other antisemitic thugs who are either self-deporting or liable to get the same treatment from federal authorities. It is how progressives and their Islamist allies have taken over American higher education in such a way as to make so many colleges and universities hostile environments for Jews.
Part of this is the result of the way foreign students have impacted American education.
Most Americans probably assume that students at one of the nation’s most venerable and respected institutions of higher learning are peers who gained admission on the basis of merit. They would probably be astonished to learn that, according to the university’s website, a majority of its students and scholars are not U.S. citizens but foreign nationals. Unlike many Americans, foreign students, especially from Middle East countries other than Israel, pay the full tuition fees with few of them on scholarships or other programs that reduce costs.
The transformation of schools like Columbia into bastions of hate for Israel and Jews is thus not entirely the function of the American left’s long march through our institutions, but also the product of the Muslim and Arab world’s successful campaign in which they have sought influence in the United States by one means or another.
Still, the stakes involved in Trump’s plans to defund schools that have tolerated and enabled antisemitism are bigger than Khalil or the infiltration of other Islamists and terror supporters into the country.
The left’s promotion of toxic theories aimed at smearing Western civilization and the United States as irredeemably racist has done incalculable damage to the humanities and, as author Heather Mac Donald has written, to the sciences as well. In addition to the harm done to education is the impact ideas that gained credibility from their sponsorship by major universities have had on American society as a whole, as well as the realms of business, journalism and government. What happens at Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite schools doesn’t stay there. It seeps into the rest of society because their graduates have so much influence on how the country operates.
Jews may be most vulnerable now, but the left’s takeover of the education system threatens all Americans. If Trump’s efforts fail and the woke orthodoxy that targets basic American values like personal liberty and equal opportunity prevails, this will call into question the nation’s future in a way that few other threats can.
The president’s attack on these schools isn’t a war on education. It’s a battle to save education and America itself at a time when a counter-cultural revolution on the nation’s campuses is desperately needed. Those liberals who say that they oppose Khalil’s views but will fight to defend his rights (even though they wouldn’t do the same for conservatives) and do their best to thwart Trump’s defunding campaign aren’t just undermining Jewish security. They are betraying the basic values of Western civilization that are the foundation of their own freedoms and the existence of the American republic.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
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