A multi-pronged assault on free speech — built on baseless accusations — is being used to justify the deportation of a permanent U.S. resident, writes Robert Inlakesh.
Protesters against Mahmoud Khalil’s detention in New York City on March 10. (SWinxy / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)
By Robert Inlakesh
MintPress News
The detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Palestinian activist involved in organizing at Columbia University, is the result of more than a year of pro-Israeli think-tank propaganda and lobbying efforts to tie the students to Hamas and erode free speech protections in the United States.
Since the first anti-war encampment at Columbia University last April, a network of pro-Israel organizations — including lobby groups, think tanks, and private security firms — has worked to dismantle the student protest movement. Their influence has been evident in the rapid and coordinated response to suppress demonstrations.
Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public claim that Khalil is a “Hamas supporter,” no evidence has been provided to substantiate the allegation. In fact, a White House official admitted in an interview with The Free Press that “the allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.”
Just by the way: independent of all the other censorship justifications offered here by Rubio, what is the basis for claiming Mahmoud Khalil is a “Hamas supporter?”
I know some believe that any opposition to Israel’s wars justifies that accusation, but anything beyond that? https://t.co/GQkQRJfTOr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 12, 2025
The Trump administration has offered no evidence of illegal or violent activity to justify its efforts to deport Khalil, a Green Card holder. Instead, his removal appears rooted in political disagreement. Washington has made clear that any speech critical of Israel can be labeled as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic” without the need to substantiate such claims.
[A federal judge has paused Khalil’s deportation after his attorneys said his arrest was a “targeted, retaliatory detention and attempted removal of a student protestor because of his constitutionally protected speech … Neither Secretary Rubio nor any other government official has alleged that Mr. Khalil has committed any crime or, indeed, broken any law whatsoever.”
Khalil has had his residency green card taken and is being held in a facility in Louisiana awaiting detention.
“This case is as clear a First Amendment violation as any case I’ve ever seen in my 23-year career,” attorney Jeffrey Pyle, who does not represent Khalil, told The Washington Post.
“From what we know so far, the United States government just ‘disappeared’ a legal U.S. resident because they don’t like his speech,” Sonja West, professor of First Amendment law at the University of Georgia Law School, who also is not Khalil’s lawyer, told the Post. “They also threatened that this is just the first of many more arrests to come. The risk of a widespread chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech is clear.”
Khalil has joined seven other Columbia students in a lawsuit against the university and the U.S. House of Representatives to block the university from turning over files on students and faculty demanded by the House.]
The absence of evidence against Khalil has been a defining characteristic of the broader campaign — driven by the Israel Lobby — to curtail First Amendment rights on college campuses. While Jewish student groups were among those leading last year’s anti-war encampments, the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters became a particular focus of political scrutiny.
A central figure in this push has been the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank frequently cited as a source for alleged links between Hamas and SJP. The FDD’s argument hinges on the claim that the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a major supporter of SJP chapters, has ties to individuals formerly associated with charities shuttered for allegedly financing terrorism. One such case, the Holy Land Foundation, resulted in convictions that have since been widely criticized as politically motivated.
The FDD first presented its claims publicly in 2016, but they failed to gain traction, mainly due to a lack of substantive proof. Among its chief concerns was that “AMP does not have to file an IRS 990 form that would make its finances more transparent.” That critique is striking, given that the Quincy Institute recently revealed the FDD itself operates with “dark money” funding and holds a zero transparency rating.
In May 2024, the Washington-based Atlantic Council suggested in an article that Iran was involved in the student protest movement. Corporate media quickly picked up on the claim and attempted to build a case around it. Yet, despite the steady stream of coverage, none of the reports were able to muster any real evidence to back up their accusation.
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies — a company with deep ties to the C.I.A. — has taken up a public crusade to reshape discourse on college campuses. His rationale for urgency is blunt: “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
Karp at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, May 2022. (World Economic Forum / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )
Safra Catz, the Israeli-American CEO of Oracle and one of the highest-earning women in global business has also weighed in on the protests. When asked about the wave of student demonstrations, she framed the issue in starkly militaristic terms:
“The reason, in my personal opinion, why they’re out there is because they think Israel is weak. They think the Jews are weak, so they stand up strong. If Israel regains its deterrence capability and America regains their deterrence capability and is strong, they will disperse like they always do. We’ve seen this pattern here in Israel — when the terrorists feel strong, they’re out in the streets. And when Israel comes in hard, they’re hiding under the floor.”
Not only did Catz compare student actions in the United States, framed as part of a “resurgence of antisemitism,” to “terrorists,” but the Israeli-American businesswoman has also contributed to both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s political bids in the past. As CEO of Oracle, which owns OpenAI, Catz doubled her company’s investment in Israel following Oct. 7, 2023.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has repeatedly accused the U.S. student movement of antisemitism and supporting Hamas, has openly called for the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.
Pro-Israel groups insist that Khalil has ties to Hamas, yet even the Canary Mission — a site notorious for doxxing pro-Palestine university students — could not produce evidence beyond his participation in a protest chant. In its extensive profile on Khalil, the only supposed proof of “support for Hamas” was his involvement in a demonstration where the crowd chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The site argues that the phrase is pro-Hamas solely because Hamas leader Khaled Mashal has used it in the past.
One of the loudest voices behind the crackdown on campus protests is Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Elise Stefanik, who has openly boasted about her role in forcing the resignations of five university presidents. Even Columbia University’s decision to give in to pressure from pro-Israel lobbying groups did not shield it from White House retaliation. The administration still moved to strip $400 million in federal funding from the university, sending a clear warning to other institutions.
This multi-pronged assault on free speech — built on baseless accusations of Hamas ties and antisemitism — is now being used to justify the deportation of a permanent U.S. resident whose wife and future child are American citizens. The campaign is part of a broader effort to erode First Amendment protections under the guise of national security.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show “Palestine Files.” Director of “Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.” Follow him on Twitter/X @falasteen47.
This article is from MPN.news is an award winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter. Additional material was added by Consortium News.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Even Columbia University’s decision to give in to pressure from pro-Israel lobbying groups did not shield it from White House retaliation. The administration still moved to strip $400 million in federal funding from the university, sending a clear warning to other institutions.”
Indeed. The servility and profiles in cowardice displayed by the college presidents the past couple of years only encouraged the goons to continue to push. What if those first three presidents called before Congress had called their bluff and told them they are full of crap, that the universities do take real antisemitism very seriously, but that criticism of a foreign country is not antisemitism, and that the demonstrations on their campuses are honored free speech and that the presidents stand behind their students exercise thereof?
Not for the First Time, Caught in the act of Religious Bigotry
Please see the recent rant by a paranoid, raving lunatic, named Alan Dershowitz, a supercilious, seriously uninformed individual, about the all-encompassing factual truths of the history of global Jewry throughout the centuries; parading his twisted, self-loving wares about the harm of ‘anti-Semitism’ to an overly fanatical group of Jewish American religious zealots; castigating any, and everyone, with different perspectives, as either self-hating Jews or out and out Judeophobes.
If this particularly despicable, bigoted Judeophile is representative of the leadership on offer for what lies ahead for a more interdenominational intercourse to include the Jewish ‘people’ the Christian people, the Muslim people, then it has to be said: there is only one ‘people’ and ‘we’ are the totality of ‘human beings’.
Sadly, and tragically, there is a main divisor, which divides and separates us, each from the other.
In the sickeningly ‘disintegrating’ world of today, this one common denominator is religious affiliation, the other being the maldistribution of power attributable to the unbridled capitalist form of economic exchange and distribution of global resources among the ‘people’..
The lecture video took place at Palm Beach Synagogue a couple of weeks ago:
www(dot)youtube.com/watch?v=qPJ4RCkYc8E
Notice the various approaches towards dealing with Trump. We’ve seen several now, ranging from China and Russia to the Senate Dems.
Trump has the style of a supremacist. By that I mean he does not have, and certainly does not show, any respect for his opponents. Supremacists tend towards strategies of bullying and intimidation, as they feel like their opponents are inferior ‘snowflakes’ who will melt before them. Sometimes they are correct. They are good at bullying those who are weak of soul (see Schumer and the Dems) or in a weak position (see Panama). But, history says that well-reasoned resistance can defeat these tactics.
Don’t fall before the first blow. Do not get into a panic because you are being attacked. If you understood your enemy, you knew it was coming. If you’ve paid any attention to Donald Trump over the decades, and he’s made himself hard not to notice, you know in advance what his tactics will look like. The man has a very public track record.
Every tactic has a weakness. The sort of tactics that are frontal assaults and attempts to steam-roller over people that the attacker views as ‘snowflakes’ have severe weaknesses. The main key to beating them is to be able to withstand the first assault that is supposed to melt a snowflake. Learning to side-step as they bull-rush the red cape you’ve offered is a more advanced form, but one that tends to open the bull’s flanks to being pricked, again in a predictable fashion. But most importantly, do not panic, and remember that resistance is not futile.
PS – I’d say the same about Netanyahu, similar mind-set, similar funding, similar tactics, but the news of the last year says that this is all very well understood by the people who successfully did not fold on his first bravado and attacks. There we find examples of both the techniques of resistance to such tactics and to the lesson that resistance is not futile.
This seems a Martin Niemoller moment: ‘They came for a Palestinian rights activist; I wasn’t Palestinian, so did nothing….’ The capitulation to this administration’s (so far more like corporate raiders than an administration!) domestic coercions and blatant authoritarianism is increasingly mind-numbing. Where it is going, and how far, could well be the measure of this time.
But But, I thought the DT and Elmo Twittler said they were all about “free speech”.
I’m shocked! the world’s richest oligarch, and a career conman made false promises.
It is so “patriotic” to use our public resources to support Genocide. The DT2 regime is all about Israel First! The clearly don’t give a f@#k about the USA. They are assets-stripping the USA, just like Ukraine.