The Kind of Thing Dictators Do

Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do. In the United States, we pride ourselves on front-loading our political tests: Once you are a citizen, you can say just about anything you want without government interference, but on your road to naturalization, the government can pull you over for certain speech infractions, such as saying nice things about terrorism or expressing a desire to overthrow the American government. The Trump administration may have had such infractions in mind last weekend, when it detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian Palestinian graduate student with U.S. permanent residency, and said it planned to eject him from the country for leading anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.

Others have remarked on the legality of this move. The administration still hasn't clearly articulated its case for deporting Khalil. But what little is known about Khalil's activities and the government's case makes me think the decision to deport is most remarkable for its pettiness, its insecurity, and its simultaneous failure to grasp the spirit of America and of academia at their best. Some countries repress dissent; others tolerate it. America is nearly alone in encouraging, even glorifying, it, and giving dissenters every chance to persuade others to their side. One of the more insidious erosions of American power is the implication, by this move, that the United States can no longer withstand the criticism of people like Khalil, and would be stronger without them.

Khalil was scheduled to graduate in May with a master’s degree in public affairs. The Trump administration’s suggestion that Khalil “support[s] a terrorist-type organization” seems to be at best an inference from his vigorous rabble-rousing against Israel and the war in Gaza on the Columbia campus, where he’s been a spokesperson and lead negotiator for the anti-Israel coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). Khalil’s representatives say he is simply advocating for the human rights of Palestinians.  

The protesters at Columbia seem to favor an approach that might be described as no Palestinian enemies, no Israeli friends. It is unclear which of CUAD’s pronouncements—ranging from reasonable to deranged—Khalil personally agrees with. If he is in favor of human rights, he should oppose CUAD’s unsigned statements, uniformly on the deranged end of the spectrum. They celebrate violence (“the necessity of imposing our demands through force”) and deplore those who try to effect change without armed struggle (reformism is “antirevolutionary,” and “aims merely to make capitalism tolerable”). One statement features an extended tribute to Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose “crowning achievement” was the October 7 massacre. That tribute at least sounds like it was written by a human being. Most of the statements are written in a robotic, affected revolutionary jargon: Allies are addressed as “comrades” and Mao and PFLP manifestos are quoted as authorities. They read like the work of a large language model trained for its sins on millions of words uttered by Maoist-Leninists between the years 1965 and 1980.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

It is possible to be outraged at Israel and simultaneously denounce the wanton killing of Israeli civilians. The protesters have chosen a very different path. On October 9, 2023, before the war in Gaza began, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine proclaimed its “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance” and the “counter-offensive” that was the slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis two days earlier. That group was enveloped into CUAD, whose posted ramblings refer to hostages held by Hamas as “prisoners of war.” It has expanded its writ and pledged last year not to rest until it achieved “the total eradication of Western civilization.”

The correct response from Western civilization is to say Bring it on. The view that the West needs dismantling remains, to say the least, unpopular in the West. And the progressively more obnoxious tactics adopted at Columbia reflect frustration at the lack of takers for the activists’ more extreme demands, both at the university and in American politics. The Gaza war has not stopped. Adding the demand that Western civilization burn to ashes is a similarly desperate move, and incidentally antithetical to the approach of the granddaddy of all Columbia Palestinian activists, the late Edward Said—who abhorred philistinism and saw wanton violence against Israelis for the abomination and political dead end that it is.

For all I know, Khalil thinks the declaration of war against Western civilization is a foolish form of mission creep. But he seems to have been content to speak for a movement that views civilization as its enemy and Hamas as its friend. The folly of deporting him is most apparent when considering the irony of this position. Khalil did not come to the United States to dismantle it. He came to study at Columbia because its international-relations program is one of the best in the world, and if he wanted to study anywhere other than the United States, he’d have had to settle for a much worse program. Hatred of the West is, like hatred of McDonald’s, an elite preoccupation and often a hypocritical one. To hate America and its politics, and yet seek a U.S. green card, is the equivalent of advocating for quinoa bowls but sneaking a Big Mac. Remember the old Woody Allen joke, where one diner at a Catskills resort kvetches about how bad the food is, and the other agrees and adds that the portions are too small.

Khalil has spent much of his time in America complaining that its policies are heinous. Now he is objecting to being forced to leave that same allegedly genocidal country. The Ernie Tubb song “It’s America: Love It or Leave It” encapsulates the Trump administration’s view of this hypocrisy. But America should take the compliment. Certain levels of American patriotism are inaccessible to native-born Americans, who are American by accident of birth and therefore have not, like Khalil, gone to great effort to Americanize themselves. He now looks poised to fight for his right, again enjoyed by native-born Americans only by chance, to remain in America indefinitely. Would he also have contested his deportation from Nazi Germany? Perhaps instead of deporting him, the Trump administration should offer Khalil citizenship.

[Graeme Wood: A Gaza protester who’s willing to suffer]

Last year, I profiled a Princeton student, David Chmielewski, who undertook a hunger strike in support of Gazans. In doing so he committed no crime, and he used a tactic that, although not totally alien to the Palestinian cause, has been rejected along with all other forms of nonviolence by Hamas. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment,” he told me. His hunger strike was small, but it reflected real devotion, expressed in a morally faultless manner. Now Khalil’s body is at stake, and he has a chance to do the same. Columbia University Apartheid Divest has called getting suspended for Gaza “the highest honor.” Surely getting deported for Gaza would be an even higher one, the summa cum laude of activism.

The decision to detain Khalil was not his. What happens next, however, is at least partly up to him. So far it appears that he will contest his detention and deportation—and as someone who finds the singling out of immigrants for their politics a loathsome development, I hope that he does, and that he prevails. But if he emerges from immigration detention a free man on American soil, I hope his next step will be to show his commitment to his cause, by shredding his green card and booking one-way passage to a country whose policies he finds more agreeable.