That is evident at Columbia. Its important protest group is Columbia College Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which claims to symbolize nearly 100 pupil organizations. The group defines itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” It regards each Israel and america as illegitimate “settler colonial” entities. (It refers to our nation as “Turtle Island.”) CUAD likes terrorist teams — or, in its phrases, “armed resistance.” With grandiose bombast, it effusively praises Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Fashionable Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas — and particularly, Hamas’s bloodbath of Oct. 7, 2023, which it discovered particularly inspiring. CUAD has promised that it’s going to “not cease demonstrating until Zionism ends.”
In January, in an incident CUAD praised on Instagram, masked, kaffiyeh-swathed college students stormed into a category on Israeli historical past taught by an Israeli professor (whom CUAD described as an “ex-IDF soldier”), trying to close it down. They distributed leaflets, which the category’s college students promptly tore up. One flyer depicted a big black jackboot stomping on a Star of David with the motto “Crush Zionism”; one other confirmed a burning Israeli flag with the tagline “Burn Zionism to the Floor.” Extra lately, masked college students occupied the library at adjacent Barnard College and distributed leaflets from the “Hamas Media Office” glorifying Yahya Sinwar, the (since-assassinated) mastermind of the Oct. 7 assaults. Sinwar’s life was devoted to murdering Jews, and he was good at it.
To disclaim that any of that is anti-Jewish is absurd; to disregard it’s a type of political blindness. It’s as harmful — and as dishonest — as assuming that every one pro-Palestinian activism is antisemitic.
Khalil, who’s 30, was born and raised in Syria, is a authorized resident of america and holds a inexperienced card (since revoked). In press experiences, he’s described as a leader and the “public face of the Columbia protests who was on their ‘entrance traces’” and in addition as a lead spokesman for the CUAD protesters who negotiated (typically futilely) with the college administration. His arrest has prompted a nationwide free-speech debate. However CUAD is, to place it mildly, no defender of both free speech or educational freedom, each of which, its mission statement says, “distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide.”
Nor does it just like the free change of concepts: It calls for that Columbia minimize all ties with Israeli universities and boycott all Israelis.
I can not know precisely what’s in Khalil’s thoughts, although he participated in the takeover of the Barnard library the place the Hamas propaganda was distributed, and he has justified “armed resistance” towards Israel. However irrespective of. I defend his proper to have rights — to due course of, to free thought, to free speech, all of that are important to being a free particular person.
And right here is the central irony of what historians sooner or later would possibly name the Khalil Affair, which has spurred new protests at Columbia: His protection rests exactly on these values of “Western civilization” — not less than in its trendy, greatest iteration — despised by the protesters he has represented.
Khalil’s arrest additionally can’t be separated from President Trump’s bigger, vicious mission of crushing larger schooling, which has spurred widespread alarm all through the academy — and, one hopes, outdoors it.
Utilizing the pretext of defending Jewish college students, Trump has stripped Columbia of $400 million in federal funds, thereby hobbling, amongst different issues, its medical analysis. Final week, Trump rescinded $800 million in federal funds from Johns Hopkins College, main it to fireplace 2,000 staff. “The professors are the enemy,” Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Legislation Faculty, has declared. Trump and Vance are as hostile as CUAD is to the most effective values (albeit generally unachieved) of upper schooling — goal scientific inquiry, tolerance of dissenting viewpoints, the seek for fact, unfettered mental debate. Right here, within the rejection of Enlightenment beliefs, the far left and the far proper embrace.
In the course of the McCarthy interval, many liberals supported — or at greatest regarded away from — the blacklisting, firing, deportation, and even imprisonment of Communists and alleged Communists. This refusal to face up for folks whose politics we’d discover abhorrent is partially what sustained the blacklist. As Victor Navasky wrote in his e book “Naming Names,” liberals, together with the liberal press, “have been main contributors to the cultural context and the ethical setting that routinized betrayal.… Many liberals shaped an unholy alliance … with the entire entourage of informers, collaborators, responsible bystanders, and get-alongers.”
We should always not make that mistake once more. Although our time is just not a duplicate of the Nineteen Fifties, that darkish interval ought to have taught us how simply political intolerance — and cowardice — can unfold. Trump’s assault on civil liberties, civil society, and cultural establishments is not going to cease with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.
I don’t need to stay on the planet that CUAD envisions. However I additionally don’t need to stay in a rustic the place Mahmoud Khalil, who has been accused of no crime, is arrested, and maybe deported, primarily based on his political beliefs or political actions. In a really actual sense, I see his freedom as inseparable from mine. Who is aware of? Possibly the Trump administration will goal you or me tomorrow.
And so I’ll proceed to assist Mahmoud Khalil’s proper to disseminate his concepts. However since I’m a liberal Zionist, I can not assist questioning: Mahmoud, would you defend mine?
