Marco Rubio’s Letter on Mahmoud Khalil

Oh, dear. The administration’s stormtroopers are running wild through the land, smashing the storefronts of businesses owned by Democrats, closing down every school that does not display the Ten Commandments, abducting all foreigners who didn’t register as Republicans, and whisking them away to a re-education camp in Alaska.

That, at least, seems to be the view of Marianne Hirsch, a Columbia University professor who grew up in Communist-ruled Romania, in a piece she has just published in The Forward. America today reminds her of life under the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, as you can see here: “Columbia Prof. Marianne Hirsch: Mahmoud Khalil Arrest Reminds Me of Growing Up Under Authoritarianism,” Democracy Now!, April 10, 2025:

Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch’s new article in The Forward is titled “I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook.” She tells Democracy Now! that seeing footage of the ICE arrests of Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk “brought back these feelings of terror that I had as a child.” Hirsch grew up in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and says she sees parallels between the climate of fear she was raised in and the repression of speech and protest on campuses today. Hirsch, who is Jewish, condemns the “anticipatory capitulation” of universities, like Columbia, to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding and says “the reason for this was never to fight antisemitism, but it was to decimate academia.”

Ignoring Hirsch’s hysteria — which is only a slight exaggeration from what Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers have been claiming — we should look at what the government has now said, in the two-page letter by Secretary of State Mario Rubio submitted to the court that contributed to the decision that the government had a right to revoke his green card and deport him. The letter (or memorandum) submitted by Secretary Rubio invoked a 1952 law, the McCarran-Walter Act, that gave the federal government the authority to keep out, or to deport, foreigners whose presence would compromise an important foreign policy goal of the American government. Rubio’s memo, which was undated, was released by Khalil’s legal team on Thursday, the day after the Trump administration submitted it in an immigration court filing. It does not accuse Khalil of any crime. But Rubio writes that Khalil’s continued presence in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign consequences, and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.”

What are those “adverse foreign consequences”? Well, Khalil’s noisy support for Hamas, a designated terror organization, and a threat to our ally Israel, is one such “adverse consequence.” It undermines support for the war on terrorist groups such as Hamas. When Khalil led students to chant “From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free,” he was calling for the obliteration of the Jewish state and the expulsion, or murder, of its Jewish population. The survival of Israel is one goal — a major one — of American foreign policy that Mahmoud Khalil seeks to undermine. When the campus brownshirts scream “Intifada Everywhere,” they are no longer expressing just anti-Israel animus, but calling for the destruction of Jews everywhere.

More on the letter submitted by Secretary Rubio can be found here: “Trump administration lays out its evidence for deporting activist Mahmoud Khalil,” by Joel Rose and Adrian Florido, NPR, April 10, 2025:

…Khalil and his lawyers also dispute the charge of antisemitism.

“What is the antisemitism?” Van Der Hout said during a Zoom meeting with reporters on Thursday. “It is criticizing Israel and the United States for the slaughter that is going on in Gaza, in Palestine. That’s what this case is about.”

“What is the antisemitism?” one of Khalil’s lawyers indignantly asks. How about the wild charge by the protesters, led by Khalil, who insist that the Jewish state is “committing ethnic cleansing and genocide” — a charge that has only one purpose, to whip people up enough so that they engage in anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior. This charge of “genocide” is not rational criticism, but an antisemitic canard intended to blacken the image of the one Jewish state, and constitutes as well an incitement to violence against Jews. After all, if the Jewish state commits “genocide,” and Jews everywhere support Israel, that must mean they support “genocide.” So, of course, Khalil and his followers want to “Globalize the Intifada.”

At the very least, those protesters on the Columbia campus should not be allowed to scream their hatred of Israel at Jewish classmates, shouting them down if they tried to say a word in support of Israel, temporarily holding hostage Jewish students who had merely been walking to class, roughing others up, and attempting to shut down any classes taught by Israeli or Jewish professors, and invading and then vandalizing campus buildings. And that is exactly what happened on the Columbia campus, with Mahmoud Khalil leading the protesters in their chants as they denounce Israel’s “genocide” and call for Israel’s destruction, and egging them on to do still more, such as harassing Jewish students, disrupting classes taught by Israeli professors, even encouraging students to enter and vandalize campus buildings. And through all this mayhem, interruption of classes, destruction of university property, antisemitic chants calling for Israel to be destroyed and replaced by a 23rd Arab state, the leader of the pack on Morningside Heights has been Mahmoud Khalil, now pretending to be a “martyr for the cause of freedom of speech,” though he was eager to have his demonstrators silence, by shouting down, anyone trying to express a pro-Israel sentiment.