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The Drama over Mahmoud Khalil's Detention Is Not Really about Him. It Is about the Fate of the U.S.

(Newsweek) Josh Hammer - The national political conversation has curiously focused on whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year's violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. Mahmoud Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. CUAD has referred to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis as a "moral, military, and political victory" and asserted that it is fighting for nothing less than the "total eradication of Western civilization." Khalil personally distributed propaganda pamphlets titled "Our Narrative - Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," borrowing Hamas's code name for Oct. 7. Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. He is a green card holder - a legal alien. And he can only remain on our soil when the U.S. consents to it. The power to exclude is the singular defining feature of what it means to be a sovereign. When the alien violates the terms of his admission, he can be removed. Khalil violated the terms of his sojourn here by supporting at least one (perhaps multiple) U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and by making common cause with an organization clamoring for "the total eradication of Western civilization." The day the U.S. loses the ability to deport noncitizens who espouse such toxic beliefs is the day the U.S. ceases to be a sovereign nation-state. Thus, the drama over Khalil's arrest and detention is not really about Khalil. It is about the fate of the U.S.
2025-03-18 00:00:00
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