The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever harrowingly closer to a nuclear weapon, and Russia and Ukraine get tantalizingly close to a ceasefire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that but instead on 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 likely 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 violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. You would never know that, of course, from the media’s incessant focus on the Khalil saga. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup last fall they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?
In any event, Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). 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.
Even more relevant, Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. He is a green card holder — a legal alien. And like any alien, legal or illegal, he can only remain on our soil when the sovereign — in the U.S., that’s “We the People” — consents to it. And when we remove our consent, then the alien must go.
The power to exclude is the singular 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 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his 2001 dissent in Zadvydas v. Davis, quoting Justice Robert Jackson’s earlier assertion in Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei (1953): “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: Any alien, from someone here on a tourist visa to a green card holder, is here solely because We the People — the citizens of this nation — consented to it. When the alien violates the terms of their admission, they can be — indeed, must be — removed. That alien, moreover, can be removed summarily if so desired; there is no specific level of “due process” to which an alien is entitled.
That brings us back to Khalil — a foreign national who violated the terms of his sojourn by supporting at least one (perhaps multiple) U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and by making common cause with an organization clamoring more generally for “the total eradication 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.
And therein lies the entire point.
The Khalil saga is where we see the intersection of the three menacing anti-Western ideologies I identity in my new book out this Tuesday, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” First, there is the woke angle: Khalil and his ilk believe in the neo-Marxist “oppressor”/”oppressed” dichotomy, and his view of Israel as an “oppressor” underlies his repugnant activism. Second, there is the Islamist angle: Khalil supports Sunni Islamist outfits such as Hamas. Third, there is the global neoliberal angle: Those protesting Khalil’s detention see little to no distinction between citizen and noncitizen — like John Lennon’s dystopian song “Imagine,” they envision a borderless world.
The drama over Khalil’s arrest and detention is thus not really about Khalil. It is about the fate of the United States — and the destiny of the very West of which the U.S. is the foundational cog.
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 Donald Trump’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. Rather, they seek to “free” him — and all of us — from the shackles of Western civilization itself.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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