As Usual, the Mahmoud Khalil Story is More Complicated Than the Reporting Says

The news today is about the supposedly shocking arrest by ICE officials of the Palestinian immigrant Mahmoud Khalil, a grad student at Columbia University who holds a green card as a permanent legal resident. Khalil served as a spokesman and a negotiator for the anti-Israel student occupation that took over the university last year, and his detention is being framed as the First Amendment martyrdom of a brave student who merely criticized Zionism:

Senate Democrats have adopted the same frame, explaining that the Great Orange Xenophobe wishes to deport Khalil because of mere speech acts:

But as always, you learn new things when you use the Google search tool that limits your search to a particular date window, excluding recent results that reflect the relentlessly mindless anti-Trump framing of all the paste-eating establishment political media. You’ll never guess who else warned that the Columbia occupation, which Khalil served as a spokesman and a negotiator, had crossed the line into plainly illegal action that wasn’t protected by the First Amendment:

Note the date on this headline, and you’ll see which White House condemned the action Khalil was participating in:

So the Trump administration, like the Biden administration, believes that the Columbia occupiers broke the law, went too far, and traveled well beyond the limits of the First Amendment, in a moment in which Mahmoud Khalil was a leading representative of the illegal action.

Keep reading headlines and stories that pre-date the recent immigration arrest. BBC headline from last year:

Sample paragraphs from that story, describing the frankly confrontational role of the leadership figure Mahmoud Khalil:

He did this often, representing himself as a figure who spoke for people who occupied and destroyed campus property, who covered their faces to hide their identities while they took illegal action, and who threatened to escalate — relaying that threat through their spokesman, Mahmoud Khalil.

Khalil spoke often about the threat to escalate, in language that clearly suggested the campus occupation wouldn’t be bound by the limits of legal protest:

“What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they’ve done in conventional and unconventional ways. So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any — any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from from Israel,” said Mahmoud Khalil, student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

I don’t know if the arrest and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil are lawful, or have been conducted properly. I don’t know what the courts will decide. I don’t know if the care Khalil took to speak for people breaking into buildings, but not to break into buildings himself, will work to protect him from the loss of his status as a legal resident.

I do know that he isn’t being cruelly targeted for the mere expression of opinions, and the silliness of that argument is embarrassing.

What happened at Columbia was flatly not the mere expression of opinion.

Over and over again. We live in a hall of mirrors, awash in nonsensical misrepresentation about events that are narratively rearranged to suit the political needs of the moment. It’s a kind of socially induced madness, training people to see things that aren’t there.

Mahmoud Khalil, that poor gentle martyr.