When Mahmoud Khalil was taken into custody, the media portrayed the ex-student's case as a First Amendment issue. Khalil had organized "pro-Palstinian" protests on the campus of Columbia University and the media was portraying his arrest as a violation of his free speech rights.
But argument without context is simply noise. Khalil was openly supporting a group, Hamas, that dozens of nations, including "including Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Israel, the Organization of American States, Paraguay, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom," designate as a terrorist group.
The American media, for the most part, refuses to connect "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Hamas" as a single protest. It's ludicrous. In the West Bank and Gaza, if you're anti-Hamas, you don't live long. If you support peace talks with Israel, you don't live long. That's the reality for Palestinians.
I fervently hope the U.S. government recognizes that the First Amendment protects even controversial speech by controversial people. However, the controversy over Khalil has little to do with his free speech rights. Khalil's offense was his advocacy for a terror group.
We are likely to hear more about the government's case against Khalil the next time he's in court. But his actions to date give Washington plenty of cause to deport him.
On October 9, 2024, The New York Times reported CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest] marked the anniversary of Hamas slaughtering over 1,200 Israeli civilians by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for the mass murder: "One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory." The group posted an essay calling the attack a "moral, military and political victory" and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.
This is pro-Hamas. It should not be whitewashed as "pro-Palestinian." But this is what the broadcast networks do. The documented facts that CUAD supports Hamas are downplayed as mere Trump talking points.
We all know there are limits to free expression. Advocating in favor of Hamas breaks those limits and violates American law by giving support to terrorists.
This is how NBC Nightly News framed Khalil's arrest.
"Tonight, anger spilling onto New York City sidewalks after federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, who his lawyer says is a legal permanent resident with a green card. Khalil recently finished a master’s [degree] at Columbia and helped lead pro-Palestinian protests on campus. His lawyer adding, he was detained on Saturday in front of his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant."
Khalil's wife, pregnant or not, has nothing to do with his case. NBC trotted her out for the sole purpose of jerking tears from the audience.
NBC couldn’t even observe that Khalil’s supporters in the streets are radical leftists. These networks can never locate anyone who’s an "extremist" or a "radical" on the "far left." That’s probably because they agree with them, or at least ally themselves with them against the horror they find in Team Trump.
Ikeda also related that Khalil told the AP the allegations against him are mostly "social media posts that I had nothing to do with." They’re playing this as guilt by association. A recent video post on X captures Khalil openly justifying Hamas terrorism: "We’ve tried armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism."
To pretend that killing women, children, and any non-combatant is "armed resistance" is Orwellian. Justifying Hamas terrorism, whether it's on social media posts or in a speech at Columbia, is a deportable offense.
The First Amendment is not a suicide pact. Send Khalil back to wherever his home is and bar him from ever entering the U.S. again.
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