The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever closer to a nuclear weapon and Russia and Ukraine are getting tantalizingly close to a cease-fire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that, but instead on protests over the uncertain fate of a lone noncitizen and former Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil.
Talk about a misplacement of priorities. Most American media consumers care a great deal about their pocketbooks and retirement accounts. They probably also care about stability on the world stage — a subdued China, a relatively calm Middle East and a long-overdue peace deal to end the bloodshed in Eastern Europe.
By contrast, here is one thing media consumers probably don’t care a lot about: Whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year’s pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup in the fall that they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?
By any metric, Khalil is a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He acted as the lead negotiator for a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has referred to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, 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.”
Even more relevant, Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. He is a green card holder, a “legal alien.” And he can remain on our soil only when the sovereign — in the U.S., that’s “We the People” — consents to it. When we remove our consent, that person can be deported.
The power to exclude is a defining feature of what it means to be a sovereign. Emer de Vattel’s highly influential 1758 treatise, “The Law of Nations,” described this power as plenary: “The sovereign may forbid the entrance of his territory either to foreigners in general, or in particular cases, or to certain persons, or for certain particular purposes, according as he may think it advantageous to the state.” And as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted in a citation in a 2001 dissent, “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.”
It’s quite simple, really: If someone in the U.S. on a tourist visa or in possession of a green card violates the terms of his admission, he can be removed. That brings us back to Khalil — a foreign national who allegedly violated the terms of his sojourn by supporting at least one U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization, and by making common cause with an organization clamoring more generally for the end of Western civilization. The day the United States loses the ability to deport noncitizens who espouse such toxic beliefs is the day the United States ceases to be a sovereign nation-state.
The Khalil saga is where we see the intersection of the three toxic anti-Western ideologies. First, there is the “woke” angle: Khalil represented CUAD, which espouses a neo-Marxist oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, and its view of Israel as an “oppressor” underlies Khalil’s repugnant activism. Second, there is the Islamist angle: CUAD supports Sunni Islamist outfits such as Hamas. Third, there is the global neoliberal angle: Those protesting Khalil’s detention see little distinction between citizen and noncitizen — as in John Lennon’s dystopian song “Imagine,” they envision a borderless world.
Khalil’s arrest and detention are thus only in part about Khalil. On Monday, the official X account for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats posted, alongside a corresponding photo, “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” But if those Senate Democrats and Khalil’s myriad other apologists are being honest, they seek not merely to “free” Khalil from President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Rather, they seek to free him — and all of us — from the shackles of Western civilization itself.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
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