In 1977, a group of self-styled Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town that was home to over 40,000 Jews, thousands of whom were Holocaust survivors. After the city denied the group’s request for a permit to march, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) defended the Nazis, arguing in a case that reached the Supreme Court, that the group’s First Amendment free speech rights were being violated. Though the march ultimately never took place, the Court ruled, in National Socialist Party of America v Village of Skokie, that even the free speech rights of Nazis must be safeguarded.
Though the ACLU – which later would succumb to illiberal, Woke pieties and reach the conclusion that free speech harms the “marginalized” – was criticised by many at the time, nobody denied that they were a legitimate civil rights group devoted solely to the viewpoint-neutral protection of free expression. Crucially, neither the ACLU nor any of their supporters denied that the Nazis they represented were morally repulsive. The Nazi marchers themselves of course were not given sympathetic coverage in the media or offered opportunities to publish op-eds or letters in the New York Times or Washington Post.
However, this distinction, in defending a morally reprehensible individual narrowly based on a fealty to Constitutional principles while not whitewashing the racism or extremism of the person being defended, has been lost in the coverage of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil is a Syrian-born Columbia University graduate and US permanent resident who was detained earlier in the month by US immigration officers, and faces deportation for his activism on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD).
On March 19, the Guardian – and, notably, the ACLU – published a letter from Mahmoud Khalil that he purportedly dictated to his family and friends while being held in a Louisiana detention center. The piece was originally titled “Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana“, which was quite possibly crafted to evoke memories many Americans have of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail‘
In the letter, Khalil writes the following:
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night.
However, CUAD, the organisation Khalil is affiliated with, in addition to their antisemitic bullying and intimidation of Jewish students since Oct. 7, doesn’t merely support a “free Palestine”. The group calls for Israel’s annihilation, and openly supports Hamas and the terror group’s Oct. 7th massacre, facts which aren’t hard to uncover, as CUAD announced their explicit support for the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust on their Substack page.
On that site, you can read a call for Israel’s annihilation, support for Hamas “martyrs”, “tributes” to Hamas Oct. 7th mastermind Yahya Sinwar, and their celebration of “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”:
The CUAD tribute described Sinwar as a “brave man” who will live in the hearts of many, and praised the October 7 Massacre as “Sinwar’s crowning achievement” because the “Al-Aqsa Flood was the very essence of what it is to resist ‘with what we have.”
CUAD has even called for the destruction of Western civilisation.
Khalil himself, it should be noted, is on record defending Palestinian terrorism, claiming that it is “legal under international law”.
However, it’s not only Khalil who dishonestly frames himself, and the organisation he’s represented, as merely “pro-Palestinian”. Outlets like the BBC have similarly omitted CUAD’s full throated support for Hamas’s annihilationist antisemitism. In our post on the BBC’s coverage of Khalil, we noted that their reporter risibly characterised CUAD benignly as “a student group that demanded, among other things, the university to divest from its financial ties to Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza.”.
Moreover, the Guardian’s coverage of Khalil isn’t limited to their decision to publish his letter. The pro-Hamas student has been feted on their pages as a civil rights hero, and sometimes framed as the victim of sinister pro-Israeli forces. To be fair, however, Khalil has been venerated, to varying degrees, at other outlets as well, not merely at anti-Zionist propaganda sheets like the Guardian.
What most media outlets and so-called ‘human rights’ organisations don’t understand is, far from being the peaceful, liberal activist he pretends to be, there is no moral difference between the would-be Nazis marchers at Skokie and the pro-Hamas agitators like Khalil who march at Columbia and other leading Western universities, intimidating Jewish students in service of a totalitarian, antisemitic movement.
While Khalil’s legal rights to promote pro-Hamas views may be in dispute, the monstrous nature of his movement is not.
