Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is an assault on free speech in America

Protesters outside a hearing on the detention of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in New York on Wednesday. Reuters

The administration of US President Donald Trump has left everyone who cares about free speech in the country little choice but to defend and champion Mahmoud Khalil, as he faces the most insidious attack on freedom of conscience in America in at least 60 years.

Mr Khalil has been arrested, pending deportation, for his involvement last year as a Columbia University student protesting Israel’s brutal and self-declared “war of vengeance” in Gaza, and role as a negotiator for other students. He hasn’t been accused of any crime at all, except violating, in retrospect, Mr Trump's recent executive order against the spread of “anti-Semitism”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has drawn upon cobweb-covered and seldom-invoked powers to claim that he poses a national security risk and must be expelled as a terrorist threat. This appears to have no basis. If Mr Rubio has any evidence connecting him to terrorism or advocacy of violence, that’s unknown.

The most extensive “dossier” on Mr Khalil was compiled by Canary Mission, a group that claims to “document individuals and organisations that promote hatred of the US, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond”. This dossier is a barrage of accusations that cites no statements he personally made in favour of Hamas or the attack against Israel on October 7, or in favour of violence. It goes to great lengths to connect him by various degrees of separation to others who may have crossed various lines of propriety. But it’s just guilt by association.

There has never been a modern US administration with such zealous enthusiasm for using the government’s power to enforce politically correct speech

Mr Khalil – a Palestinian refugee born in Syria and studying at Columbia during the war in Gaza – protested the connection of his own university and other US institutions to this protracted atrocity that cost tens of thousands of civilian lives. Apparently, he also had the temerity to serve as a negotiator between university officials and other students, often more radical than himself. Stripped of a blatant anti-Palestinian bias and loathing, that would appear to be a useful and constructive role – not an indictment.

But let’s just suppose Mr Rubio is in possession of more damning evidence against Mr Khalil. Unless this evidence rises to the incitement of imminent violence – such as, for example, the statements of many of his own cabinet colleagues and the US President himself before the attack against Congress on January 6, 2021 – or explicit endorsements of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, 2023, it is going to be extremely difficult to make the case that a permanent legal resident, married to a US citizen, who is otherwise blameless, can be reasonably arrested and deported – although to where is not clear – purely on the basis of political incorrectness.

Students and activists protesting against the Gaza war face police after demonstrators were evicted from the library at Portland State University in Oregon. AFP

A car is damaged after it was driven towards protesters at Portland State University. AFP

Students write letters in support of Palestinians in Gaza at an encampment at George Washington University, in Washington. AP

Pro-Palestinian protesters confront a state trooper at the University of Texas in Austin. AFP

Texas State troopers stand guard at the University of Texas. AFP

A protester confronts University of Texas police. AFP

A demonstrator protests outside the encampment established in support of Palestinians in Gaza at Columbia University, in New York City. AFP

A student protester flies a kite inside the protest encampment at Columbia University. AP

Students at Columbia University write a message as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues. Reuters

Student protesters march round their encampment at Columbia University. AP

A student is arrested at a protest encampment on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. AP

Police move to bring down an encampment after several days of protests by pro-Palestinian activists on the Virginia Tech campus. AP

Vish Gill, a prominent figure at pro-Palestine protests, is arrested at Virginia Tech campus. AP

Pro-Israel counter-protesters gather at a pro-Palestine demonstration at the University of California, Los Angeles. Reuters

Pro-Palestine demonstrators gather on the campus of Columbia University. AP

There has never been a modern US administration with such zealous enthusiasm for using the government’s power to enforce politically correct speech throughout the executive branch, in schools, libraries and other institutions, and to punish – including by deportation – those vulnerable for politically incorrect ideas.

Mr Khalil is a proponent of divestment from Israel on the grounds that it is an apartheid state. This offends many right-wing evangelicals and Jewish Americans. Apparently, this also offends the administration to the point of wishing to remove him and any other similar foreign national – including even permanent residents, traditionally held to be protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and freedom of conscience – from the country.

I have consistently voiced doubts about the wisdom of using the term “apartheid” to describe the system of separation and inequality that Israel imposes on Palestinians in the occupied territories. This is because it tends to steer the conversation into a debate about South African history rather than Israeli policy. However, the system that Israel imposes by force on Palestinians more than merits such an accusation.

Universities with policies against investing in states practising “apartheid”, adopted during the battle against “systematised racism in South Africa”, are highly vulnerable to having those policies applied to investment in Israel. It is impossible to honestly, accurately and sincerely deny that Israel is imposing a form of apartheid on Palestinians – in some ways less severe, but in many ways more severe, than in South Africa before the end of apartheid. Calling this “anti-Semitism“ is simply a lie.

Arab Americans in Michigan are sticking with Trump as long as Gaza ceasefire holds

02:20

None of this is probably of interest to the Trump administration. What appears to matter to Mr Trump and Mr Rubio is not the truth, or constitutional rights like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, but rather the application of a campaign promise to crack down on anti-war protesters who opposed on college campuses Israel’s brutality in Gaza. Mr Trump described this as part of a “radical revolution” and vowed to “set that movement back 25 or 30 years”.

That somehow didn’t seem to register with the thousands of Arab Americans who voted for him or irrelevant third-party candidates, or, worst of all, stayed home. As usual, nothing that Mr Trump is doing is anything he didn’t say he was going to do on the campaign trail. Mr Khalil, he promises, will be the first of many expulsions.

But if permanent residents with green cards like Mr Khalil can be arrested and potentially deported for perfectly legitimate political speech – which is not only constitutionally protected but is also intellectually and morally valid and, arguably, unassailable – there is really not much protecting citizens from a government crackdown either. This is part of a broader attack on US higher education, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, and, ultimately, the right of Americans to respond with activism to appalling human rights abuses.

I haven’t been a university student for decades. But I know this: with the exception of students who are merely seeking degrees for professional advancement, or those who are focused on domestic social justice, those student activists who are animated by international justice issues who had not responded to the Gaza war with major protest campaigns – given the involvement of the US and its institutions with Israel and its war effort – would have been unworthy and remiss in their self-defined mission. There would’ve been something wrong with them.

There was nothing wrong with Mr Khalil, except that he did what anyone else with his convictions and in his position would have done – at least as far as we know. That he is being punished for that constitutes the most chilling assault on free speech and freedom of conscience in the US since the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. And if that isn’t enough to wake up everyone with a conscience, it’s hard to know what would be.