By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-03-14 21:52:02 | Updated at 2025-03-15 06:17:36
8 hours ago
Let’s be clear about Mahmoud Khalil: He’s a green card holder who has distributed propaganda from Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group, at Columbia University, where he has organized violent protests that fomented despicable antisemitism.
He has led a group that harassed Jews and committed a slew of other abhorrent and illegal acts including vandalism, destruction of property and even attacks on Columbia security staff.
The federal Immigration and Nationality Act indisputably forbids aliens, including green card holders, from supporting or promoting a designated terrorist organization such as Hamas.
Doing so is grounds to revoke such an individual’s green card.
Under federal law, it is also clear that the secretary of state can deport such individuals for engaging in activities that have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Bear in mind, Khalil is no run-of-the-mill lunatic.
He has brandished literature stamped with the “Hamas Media Office” logo. How did he get that?
Yet Democrats and the left-wing media are cynically using Jews — and, yes, once again, even evoking the Holocaust — to argue against Khalil’s detention.
They are wielding Jewish history — and the ultimate example of Jewish victimhood — to protect this terrorist-surrogate antisemite and object to his deportation.
When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) denounced Khalil’s arrest, he intoned, “Today it’s Mahmoud Khalil. Tomorrow, it’s me or you.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) similarly stated, “If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too.”
Both quotes deliberately recall the famous 1946 poem “First They Came . . .” by Martin Niemöller.
In it, Niemöller bemoans the German people’s silence during the Nazis’ rise to power. He catalogs the incremental purging of various groups — Communists, socialists, Jews and others — in the march to the Holocaust.
“Then they came for me,” the poem ends. “And there was no one left / To speak out for me.”
Shame on Murphy, Ocasio-Cortez and the mainstream media for this craven display.
In a particularly disgusting maneuver, media outlets like PBS and the increasingly radicalized New York Times have enthusiastically cited two extreme-left “Jewish” groups who oppose Khalil’s deportation.
They know better.
They just don’t care.
These groups, Jewish Voices for Peace and IFNotNow, are widely rejected by effectively all mainstream Jewish groups as being virulently anti-Israel and even antisemitic.
The Anti-Defamation League — far from a conservative organization — has labeled JVP as a fringe group that “intentionally exploits Jewish culture and rituals” to attack and undermine Israel. It has even included JVP in its antisemitism tracking initiative.
In the weeks after the 2024 election, I foolishly believed that perhaps the left had actually learned something about the dangers of their own extreme factions.
I thought Democrats would begin to reform their views to reflect common sense and what makes Americans safer and better off.
I was wrong.
Mahmoud Khalil’s case is not a hard one.
His complicity with Hamas rhetoric and his illegal behavior at Columbia make him a prime candidate for deportation, both morally and under the law.
Most important of all, his deportation makes Americans safer.
But it’s just politics as usual for the Democrats who hide their eyes from the truly evil threat before them.
Khalil, of course.
Not the American government.
Yes, the Jews will suffer first.
But we should all understand the true implications of Martin Niemöller’s poem.
Eventually, if this terror within our borders is given free rein, none of us will be safe.
Jeffrey Lax is a CUNY professor of law, chair of the business department and co-founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY.
