THE RESUMED GENOCIDE IN GAZA CALLS FOR
AN EMERGENCY PEACE VIGIL
TODAY, WEDNESDAY,
MARCH 19,
5:30-6:30 PM
Mahmoud Khalil’s Illegal Kidnapping is the Tip of a Fascist Spear
We must confront and stop this now
Image: “Release Mahmoud Khalil” protests, NYC by Laurie Davidson
A Palestinian human rights advocate, Mahmoud Khalil, has been kidnapped from his Columbia
University residence and illegally detained by ICE/DHS agents, first in New Jersey, and now in
a private prison in Louisiana.
months pregnant. He has broken no U.S. laws, or at least none his ICE captors will name, and he
is entitled to all the protections of the U.S. Constitution. He is a self-described human rights advocate,
and what he has done is participate in campus protests against the ongoing Israeli genocide against
Gazans and residents of the West Bank, where his family is from. During these protests, he was the
designated negotiator between the students protesting and the Columbia administrators, working
to avoid any undue conflicts.
Why call this a kidnapping? First, the four plainclothes DHS agents entered Khalil’s housing space
illegally. He gave them no permission. The agents claimed they had a “warrant.” This was a lie, they
had no legal warrant at all. They claimed they had a warrant to revoke his student visa. Khalil informed
them he wasn’t on a student visa. He had a green card. After a quick phone conversation, the agents
claimed they now had authority to revoke his green card. Another lie. They did not. They simply seized
Khalid, rejected any queries from his lawyers, and quickly flew him to Louisiana. Why? To separate him
from family and effective legal advice, the opposite of habeas
corpus.
What did the agents have? Simply a directive from Trump and Marco Rubio, via DHS, to arrest and
deport him for being pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic, and thus disruptive of U.S. foreign policy. None of
this is true, and even if it were, it is still protected speech under the First Amendment. How was he likely
targeted? An Israeli professor at Columbia who disliked Khalil intensely contacted Marco Rubio and
asked him to do something. Rubio then discussed the matter with Trump, fishing for a rationale to justify
Khalil’s
persecution.
green cards and breaking no laws, if he thought their ongoing presence would have “serious adverse f
oreign policy consequences.” (The architect of that 1952 regulation, Nevada Senator Patrick McCarran,
portrayed Jews as Soviet agents and “subversive rats that need to be kept out.”) The regulation is
obscure and odious, and it is not at all clear it could be applied to Khalil as an individual. Moreover,
Rubio would first have to have an immigration court take away Khalil’s green card protections, which
is not within the State Department’s reach.
Rubio’s foreign policy reasoning? “There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class. You pay all
this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even
go to class. You’re afraid to go to class because these lunatics are running around with covers on
their face, screaming terrifying things.” (Lunatics like the
pardoned January 6th criminals?)
We need to see that the Trump attack on Khalil is the tip of the spear. The first stab is ideological.
All protests against Israel’s actions regarding Palestinians are, ipso facto, by that very fact, anti-Semitic
and pro-Hamas. Never mind the fact that large numbers of Jewish students, through their peace
and justice groups, and hundreds of Rabbis, have joined many of these same protests. Trump even
sends Mike Huckabee as the new ambassador to Israel, who asserts “there is no such thing as a
Palestinian,” a view shared by
Pete Hegseth, his new Defense Secretary.
of him. He proclaims that “this is just the beginning” and we can expect hundreds of more arrests, since
being pro-Palestinian also means you are “pro-terrorist” and can be arrested or deported under any of
the several post 9/11 draconian laws regarding terrorism. At the top of the list are some six million
Palestinian-Americans, then perhaps a hundred million U.S. citizens who think Palestinians in Israel
have rights to be respected by all. Most of these are Democratic voters, and they are thus warned to
shut up and stay out of politics.
believes are controlled “by the radical left.” Unless they are purged of all critical thought, he will cut
off millions in government support. He already took $400 million from Columbia. More than anyone,
we on the left know this is ridiculous. Despite a few reforms won in the 1960s regarding Black, Women’s,
and various other studies departments, it is quite clear to us that higher education remains firmly in the
hands of the capitalist class and serves its interests. That was one reason motivating the students
at Columbia in the first place, the university’s support for the war machine, especially in the Middle East.
Many of us have seen this movie before. In the early days of the 1960s civil rights protests in the South,
students were labelled “outside agitators” and “paid agents of the Kremlin and the communists.”
Early protestors against the Vietnam War were called “traitors” and “unpatriotic,” with some ROTC
hecklers throwing red paint on them. Universities threatened to take away any federal loans. With
J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO assault, things turned worse. We saw the assassination of Fred
Hampton and the murders of many other Black Panther Party members. Hoover started the program
in 1956 against the CPUSA, but widened its scope against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, many others
in Black-led movements, and the entire New Left. (This writer was on COINTELPRO’s short list
of “those to be neutralized.”)
We stood up to these attacks fearlessly from the start. As far as we were concerned, “McCarthyism”
was dead and over. If called before hearings or the courts, we would disrupt or otherwise protest t
hem with guerilla theater. The House Un-American Activities Committee died the day Jerry Rubin
showed up to testify wearing a Santa Claus suit, claiming he wanted all the kids watching TV to
see HUAC attacking Santa Claus. Eventually, especially after returning GIs joined a massive
antiwar mobilization in D.C. and threw their medals back at Congress, the tide turned. A militant
minority had become
a progressive majority.
That points to the task before us: we have to turn today’s militant minority in solidarity with Gaza
and the West Bank into a progressive majority demanding a ceasefire and cutoff of funds to Israel.
In some ways, the stakes are higher and more difficult. Antisemitism, in many ways, is a more
difficult label for many to see through than “communism,” especially with a population divided
into separate media silos.
We know all the instruments to play. Circulate and sign petitions, get a letter in your local paper
(worth tens of thousands of leaflets), get your local Dems, unions, and independent political
organizations to demand freedom for Khalil, put the heat on your local members of Congress,
turn out for all the street protests, and so on.
We know the drill, and we have to engage this fight today in a big way. What’s happened to Khalil
is a huge injustice, and we need to reverse it. But this reaches far beyond Khalil, even beyond the
movement around Gaza. It reaches to Trump's overall efforts to reverse all progressive gains and
return the United States to the era of his new high-tariff seizor-of-foreign-lands hero, President
William McKinley. To the degree that we can’t stop it here, it will only get worse. We have no desire
to see a new era of bloodletting that we saw in the 1960s and 1970s. Nor can we go back to an
old “normal.” We have to move forward, shifting the terrain to defeat MAGA fascism and win governing
power for the wide alliance of a Third Reconstruction. For that position, we will face even newer
prospects, but we have to get there first.
