There’s something bitterly ironic and morally grotesque about Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers saying that the Columbia graduate student “felt as though he was being kidnapped” when federal agents showed up at his university housing last week and arrested the campus protest leader.
Those protests, of course, emerged from the attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 as the latest step in their Iranian patron’s long march to enlist the Western left’s useful idiots to bully its institutions into treating Israel as a pariah state, converting the word “Zionist” into a slur, and re-casting the Jews as the new Nazis.
More than 800 civilian men, women and children were slaughtered on Oct. 7, and more than 250 other people ranging from infants to the elderly were kidnapped.
And more than 500 days later, Hamas is still holding 59 hostages — though only 24 of them are believed to still be alive. That includes one surviving American, Edan Alexander, and the corpses of four other Americans.
Good luck hearing word one about those kidnappings from the advocates who are the most vocally outraged about the arrest of Khalil as the green-card holder who was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and is married to an American citizen who’s about to give birth to the couple’s first child but sits in an immigration jail in Louisiana while the Trump administration tries to deport him.
Khalil had been a prominent negotiator with university officials on behalf of the students and others protesting on campus, many in masks that make it harder to distinguish between those groups or to hold people to any account for their actions, including tearing down posters of those hostages and lots of street theater flirting with violence aimed at Israel and anyone visibly Jewish.
There are always cat-and-mouse asymmetries between police and protesters, but there’s a funhouse reflection in the spokesperson for a masked and menacing movement being arrested by agents who won’t identify themselves when asked to by Khalil’s wife in the video she shot of his arrest that his lawyers released on Friday.
It’s simply bad and un-American, even as many of the people who have been the most vocal about his arrest and the terribly serious and literal threat Trump poses have been all too happy to squint past their own compromises and the thumbs they’ve placed on scales and in other people’s eyes — and how that yuge blind spot helped convince enough Americans that reelecting this guy was the better option.
As the Daily News laid out in an excellent editorial titled “Speech is not a crime“: “We would ring the same alarms over the summary detention and attempted deportation of anyone targeted exclusively for their political perspectives no matter how contemptible we found them, and let’s be clear that the issue here is indeed First Amendment-protected speech.”
It continues, “no one in the federal government has produced or pointed to any evidence that Khalil did anything but speak and organize. The sleight of hand of stating that he ‘led activities aligned with Hamas,’ as the Department of Homeland Security did post-detention, is absurd theater.”
And, The News asks, “what does it mean legally or practically for someone to engage in a subjective ‘activities aligned with’ a terror group? That they have some goals or views in common? In that case, a huge portion of the Trump administration is aligned with the violent groups that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
“Patriots” and pals get pardons now and enemies get hit with the kitchen sink in Trump’s America, a Soviet Russia joke come to life.
There’s nothing funny about the Justice Department’s No. 2, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (who was Trump’s personal criminal lawyer) said Friday that “we are also looking at whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes.”
What are “terrorism crimes”?! He didn’t say.
Anyone celebrating that is their own sort of useful idiot.
A painfully obvious lesson it’s hopefully not too late to re-learn:
Either people and the institutions they are part of police their own values, or they end up at the mercy of a “strong man” who says he’s doing it on their behalf.
Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.