Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?

Then it's not clear the agents even had a warrant, in the story his wife told; they were waiting outside for the Khalils to come home from an Iftar celebration, and followed them into the building when they arrived. I have no idea what the building security was doing:

She said they were not shown any warrant “and the Ice officers hung up the phone on our lawyer”. She said they cooperated fully and her husband remained calm, even though it was terrifying and traumatizing.

“Within minutes, they had handcuffed Mahmoud, took him out into the street and forced him into an unmarked car,” she said. (Guardian)

And then something else:

Khalil’s wife said that the lead-up to the arrest had also been “a nightmare”.

“Six days ago, an intense and targeted doxing campaign against Mahmoud began. Anti-Palestinian organizations were spreading false claims about my husband that were simply not based in reality. They were making threats against Mahmoud and he was so concerned about his safety that he emailed Columbia University on March 7,” she said.

A frightening doxing campaign that started two days before the arrest? By whom? And did the agents know anything about that?

I couldn't find a case of an actual doxing—Twitter's never very helpful search function seemed to be broken by my query, and obviously anything may have been deleted anyway. But I did find something significant-looking at the X account of a website called "Canary Mission", fingering Mahmoud Kahlil as the "lead negotiator" for participants in a Columbia University Apartheid Divest sit-in at Barnard College's Milstein Library (Barnard is Columbia's women's college, Radcliffe to its Harvard as it were), which started on March 5:

Khalil would presumably have been one of the three unmasked negotiators the students wanted to invite to speak to the college president, as mentioned in the Barnard Bulletin account (except the whole thing was ended by a bomb threat and evacuation of the building, and I don't believe any formal negotiations took place). The video is from a tweet that genuinely seems to be from March 5 (there's a screenshot at the Canary Mission website profile of Khalil), so I think it's probably authentic, though Khalil is, as noted, no longer a student, and while it's true that he was suspended in April 2024 he was reinstated two days later (the website even quotes him saying "after reviewing the evidence, they found there was no evidence to suspen"), and "leading" a negotiating team is not the same thing as leading "activities aligned to Hamas, a terrorist organization", the thing ICE has accused him of, though I'm not really clear what that even means; I'll get back to that point later.

What "Canary Mission" is, according to reporting from James Bamford at The Nation, here citing from the transcript of a December 2023 Democracy Now interview at Truthout, is

a shadowy pro-Israel group that publishes the photos and personal details of students who take part in Palestinian advocacy on U.S. colleges, branding them antisemites and often damaging their career prospects. Bamford explains how this operation has direct links to the Israeli government, and that wealthy Americans who fund this effort could be breaking the law by acting as agents of a foreign power. “The purpose is to blacklist and dox students, professors, and largely anybody who disagrees with Israel or is pro-Palestinian”...

—or what I would call a Hasbara organization, spinning on behalf of the Israeli government, and what it really looks like to me is a case of the lads at the Department of Homeland Security who haven't been fired yet (or replaced those who have on a direct recommendation from the Project 2025 roster) scrolling Twitter for ideas on who to deport, and Canary Mission is the kind of source they might be looking at. 

And a Palestinian on a student visa involved in a fresh new Columbia protest is a perfect candidate, Columbia being the most famous hotbed of putative antisemitism in the country over the past year, and the DHS lads decide to go for him, scoring a warrant from a complaisant judge or perhaps not even bothering.

Only it turns out more complicated, in that (unbeknownst to Canary Mission) he's no longer in the US with a student visa but is a permanent resident, so the lads have to change their story. And then they find out that they're not allowed to deport permanent residents—who knew?—and only the secretary of state can do that, and the legalities of doing it are pretty demanding: Rubio has to get personally involved, and he must find and present evidence that he

“has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”...

Bill Hing, professor of law and migration at University of San Francisco, said that simply invoking US foreign policy aims would not be enough. He said: “The government has to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that his presence or activities in the US has potential serious adverse foreign policy consequences. The question is, how will they prove that? If he has done nothing more than decry the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, or accuse Israel of genocide, and demand ceasefire, is that adverse to US foreign policy? I don’t think so. I think that is protected free speech.”

I think Rubio is going to have a very hard time making that argument. I don't think there's a case that even open adherence to Hamas political opinions is anything but protected by the First Amendment, and I can't see how doing that could have any repercussions for American foreign policy. Nor is there any evidence that he has done that anyway; even Canary Mission can't come up with any examples, in their list of quotations, beyond the allegation that he danced at a demonstration and consistently supported the demand the Columbia divest from its Israeli financial holdings, and that he used the word "resistance", which doesn't mean "resistance" in his evil Palestinian secret code:

In the video, Khalil said [00:00:01]: "As you've seen, Palestinians have tried multiple times resistance, whether it is armed, unarmed resistance, peaceful, whatever. But Israel and the propaganda always find something to attack."

Among Palestinians and anti-Israel activists, the term “resistance” is a euphemism for nationalistic terror and is used to glorify and encourage anti-Israel and anti-Semitic violence.

If Khalil has shown adhesion to any political outfit, it would be the pro-BDS organization Jewish Voice for Peace, which he came out personally to support after its Columbia-Barnard chapter was suspended by the university in 2024:

Photo by staff photographer Gaby Diaz for the Columbia Spectator, April 24 2024. Khalil in the yellow jacket at left.

at a press conference where the question of antisemitism in the protests was deeply discussed, including by Professor Marianne Hirsch, who noted

as a faculty member who specializes in Holocaust studies and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she was “extremely distressed” to see that antisemitism is being “weaponized and misused under the guise of safety and security” with the intent of “shutting down academic freedom.” Hirsch then read the declaration adopted by the Barnard and Columbia chapter of AAUP on Friday and stressed the importance of remembering that the protests are not directed against “an identity, which is Jewishness, or a faith,” but rather are part of a movement that “criticizes the State of Israel.”

“We are a very multicultural, diverse community, and each of the identity categories that we have here is in itself diverse,” Hirsch said. “Weaponizing antisemitism in this way, singling out only certain Jewish students who are expressing fear, fear that’s being amplified and being promoted from the outside, is not making Jewish students or faculty or Jews in this country safe. On the contrary, it is promoting further division and probably further antisemitism.”

And Jewish Voices for Peace in turn came to demonstrate for him at Trump Tower yesterday.

My screenshot of Jewish Voices for Peace in the Trump Tower lobby, from CNN.

Khalil himself put the mutual relationship beautifully a year ago, speaking again with CNN:

“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.

“Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone,” he said.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.