The Mahmoud Khalil case brings into focus the embedded problem of antisemitism in higher education

And it's not only about "academic freedom"

Throughout American academia over the past few weeks the non-stop, exasperated course of conversation has been all about the Mahmoud Khalil case.

For those of you not paying attention, Khalil is a Palestinian activist and former graduate student at Columbia University, who was detained earlier in March and threatened with deportation by the Trump administration.

A refugee from the Syrian civil war, Khalil emigrated to the United States in 2022. He has been enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and was set to graduate this spring.

Khalil became well-known for his activism during Columbia’s anti-Israel protests last year and served as a negotiator with the school. His activism was presumably the occasion for his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last month on grounds that he was working on behalf of Hamas.

Khalil denies the allegations.

Khalil’s case has been a cause célèbre for members of the current anti-Trump resistance movement, especially in mobilizing opposition to the current administration’s aggressive deportation policies.

But his arrest has also been a rallying point for the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel cadres who have been storming college campuses and often harassing Jewish students since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.

One of the most intriguing dimensions of Khalil’s extensive support throughout academia is the oft-repeated mantra about the Trump administration’s denial of free speech. The ubiquitous assumption seems to be that Khalil’s capture and threatened deportation is nothing more than an unconstitutional violation of someone’s right to speak out against Israel’s policies in Gaza.

For example, Cristian Farias writing in Vanity Fair sees Khalil’s arrest as emblematic of the Trump administration’s authoritarian suppression of free expression across the board.

Through a series of crackdowns, executive orders, announcements, and other enforcement actions”, Farias writes, “[Trump has] turbocharged what can be fairly described as one of the greatest assaults on the First Amendment in modern history, harkening back to McCarthyism”.

Farias goes on:

The targeting of Mahmoud Khalil is revealing of how the government is pulling out all the stops to add a veneer of legality to its targeting campaign. On paper, at least, Khalil’s offense appears to be little more than not falling in line with the administration’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war that has ravaged Gaza.

Well, not exactly.

In a 79-page civil brief, filed recently in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York by victims of the October 7 attacks and their families, the lawsuit names Khalil specifically as one of several defendants, whom the plaintiffs maintain are “leaders” of “associations” that “form the New York City branches of Hamas’ American propaganda firm”.

The organization of which Khlalil is a “leader”, according to the plaintiffs, is Columbia University Apartheid and Divest (CUAD). The brief states that CUAD operates as an umbrella organization for entities that on information and belief, directly coordinates with Hamas…and/or other agents and affiliates of Hamas and related foreign terrorist organizations.”

It is not clear if the lawsuit has any immediate connection to the Trump administration’s arrest of Khalil,

Khalil was detained by ICE on March 9. The lawsuit was filed on March 24. But certain insiders with whom this author has contact indicate it is highly likely the Justice Department knew of the suit, if not its details, in advance of the filiing.

It is quite possible there is some legal synergy between the two cases, which is why the DOJ is not at all forthcoming with any details about why they took Khalil into custody.

Of course, even if there was overlap, none of these factors warrant the inference that Khalil is somehow guilty of what the lawsuit claims, or what the Trump administration might charge him with, or introduce as evidence in his deportation proceedings.

The deeper circumstances of the cases simply suggest far more is going on than the argument he merely failed to kowtow to “the administration’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war”.

So let’s see what the New York lawsuit genuinely alleges.

The lawsuit as a whole is founded on a highly complex legal argument that characterizes Khalil as a kind of key influencer for CUAD, which pari passu is an agent of Hamas.

The header of the filing document simply labels him the “representative” of the organization, although it also identifies him personally as a “defendant”. It also closely associates him with the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).

The plaintiffs maintain that SJP is an affiliate of CUAD, which serves as a non-profit umbrella for the former to raise money. The lawsuit connects the NSJP directly to Hamas with the following representation in paragraph 6.

Today, Hamas’ American propaganda arm is directed and controlled by AJP Educational Foundation, Inc. a/k/a American Muslims for Palestine (“AMP”) and its on-campus brand, National Students for Justice in Palestine (“NSJP”) (collectively, “AMP/NSJP”).

In paragraph 111, after tracing the complex web of links and influences for sundry U.S.-based campus entities (whom it designates as “associational defendants”) whose footprints lead back to well-known Middle Eastern militant and terrorist groups, not to mention the Iranian government, the plaintiffs contend:

Throughout the rest of the Fall 2023 Semester, the Associational Defendants regularly, routinely, and consistently followed the orders of Hamas, whether given directly or through intermediaries such as PFLP or AMP/NSJP.

The lengthy pleadings weave a tangled net of evidentiary materials with copious citations of publicly available information. One needs to be a very skilled attorney to make judgments about whether this monumental amount of evidence supports the general claims it is making.

And, again, it should be noted that these pleadings are submitted as a civil, not a criminal, complaint. If they have merit, of course, they have significant implications for any future criminal actions undertaken by federal, state, or local governments.

But the overall conclusions laid out in paragraphs 183-86 confound the conventional wisdom that Khalil’s and related cases are about nothing more than freedom of expression, or academic freedom.

Here is the full text of those paragraphs:

This case is not about individuals and organizations independently exercising their free speech rights to support whatever cause they wish—no matter how abhorrent. Rather, it is about organizations and their leaders knowingly providing substantial assistance—in the form of propaganda and recruiting services—to, and in coordination with, a designated foreign terrorist organization, Hamas. This substantial assistance is valuable to Hamas and instrumental to its ability to engage in October 7 and its subsequent and ongoing acts of international terrorism. It would be illegal for Hamas to directlt retain a public relations firm in the United States or hire enforcers to impose their will on American cities. Yet those are precisely the services that the Associational Defendants knowingly provide to Hamas. Indeed, in many instances, they do so in direct coordination with Hamas itself and/or with AMP/NSJP. In short, Hamas relies on its propagandists around the world to do its bidding, spreading its falsehoods about Israel and the Jews far and wide, and to instigate a culture of violence and fear to sway global institutions to behave in Hamas’ favor. Global propaganda, particularly directed at the West and the United States, is not just one small part of Hamas’ broader strategy: it is Hamas’ grand strategy. Sadly, Hamas’ foot soldiers in New York City and on Columbia’s campus have become so emboldened that they no longer feel the need to hide and are comfortable committing unlawful acts like taking over buildings.

For obvious reasons the lawsuit focuses singularly on Columbia University.

Yet Columbia is not terribly unique. In recent years it has become a sort of jutting promontory from the more featureless landmass of increasingly “hyperprogressive” – popularly described as “woke” - higher education overall, wherein activism replaces historic norms for assessing teaching and research, not to mention the informal mission of colleges and universities themselves.

Its location in New York City along with its large proportion of Jews and Middle Easterners has made it a natural global flashpoint for the cultural conflicts and political animosities the events of Oct. 7 ignited. Its Ivy Leagues status has given it a certain cover as well.

The Trump administration’s methodical and sequential targeting of prestige schools, both public and private, for “antisemitism” in the past month appears to be a strategy for making a public example of the most prestigious, who are often the worst, offenders.

But the administration’s tendency to play fast and loose with of due process should not be a diversion for bringing to light a profound and systemic problem today throughout post-secondary learning, which was evident years before Trump was elected or took office the second time around.

Since Oct. 7 it has become undeniable that the already über-progressive drift of American college and university educators, documented here in our last segment, has somehow crystallized and concentrated itself in an unhealthy, totally one-sided obsession with the actions of the state of Israel, which in turn have radically skewed an already tensive and fraught attitude toward Judaism as a whole.

The skyrocketing level of violence against Jews worldwide is echoed in the growing tendency of many of my near and distant US professional colleagues to refer to Jews reflexively as “Zionists”, to which one or more news accounts given substantial credence.

But it also seeps out into what an student author Yahir Santillán-Guzman, writing in The Harvard Crimson, refers to as his own top, trend-setting Ivy League school’s “academic hyperfixation on Israel”, which he brands as compromising “academic freedom.

Santillán-Guzman writes:

Harvard can and should reject instances of federal overreach, but it can only credibly do so if it demonstrates a genuine commitment to academic freedom. That starts with acknowledging that, overt antisemitism aside, a pernicious obsession with Israel exists across different pockets of the University, running counter to academic rigor and Harvard’s purported commitment to intellectual vitality.

American academia’s sudden preoccupation with Israelis, Zionists, and Jews as global villains, despite ritually denouncing the crudest forms of antisemitism conventionally associated with right-wing actors, is extremely troubling.

Even alluding to the fact can result in extensive shunning and whispering behind your back. The stereotypical response is one or both of the following:

1) “How can I be antisemitic when I believe wholeheartedly in ‘inclusiveness’”?

2) “I’m not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist”.

How dare you?

Of course, if they choose option 2), you will hear a rant that focuses on Israel as a “settler, colonialist, apartheid state” with absolutely no nuance, real understanding of what these terms traditionally have meant, or even the flimsiest indication that they understand anything about the conflicted 100-year history of Israel/Palestine.

If you ask about Hamas, which since its founding has been dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of all Jews in the Levant, they will shrug and change the subject.

The further excuse that all this hostility toward Jews in academia is merely a side effect of Israel’s brutal bombing of Gaza since Oct. 7 is belied by research data.

A study published by the Anti-Defamation Movement in November 2023, comparing incidents of antisemitism then with the climate before Oct. 7, came up with results it called “sobering”.

Even prior to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel on 10/7 and the subsequent escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, a substantial number of students—both Jewish and non-Jewish—were ambivalent about whether their campus is welcoming and supportive of Jewish students. At the same time, Jewish and non-Jewish students differed in their perception of whether campus antisemitism is a serious problem: while more than two in five Jewish students prior to 10/7 said that it was at least “somewhat” of a problem, only one in four non-Jewish students indicated the same.

In an op-ed piece from July 2022 a long-time, tenured UCLA professor wrote that he was resigning, because “typical of elite U.S. universities,” his institution was “awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism.”

The Khalil case, or at least the pile of related evidence amassed in the brief for the New York case, as well as the robotic and autonomic reaction to it throughout the halls of ivy should give us pause about what might be really going on?

The lawsuit propounds unabashedly that prominent groups at Columbia, and perhaps spread across the spectrum of higher ed, have become their own kind of “public relations” machinery for known international terrorist movements, who employ antisemitism as the central instrument within their noxious propaganda toolkit.

Whether that claim is completely over the top, or has its own deeper and murkier logic, cannot be addressed merely by dismissing it as a “conspiracy theory.”

Conspiracy theorists don’t usually provide comprehensive footnoting of credible journalistic accounts and legal documents.

The Trump administration’s sledgehammer tactics toward higher ed cannot be called out exclusively to discount the more substantive accusation that there is a toxic fungus among us.

But it’s certainly not just about “academic freedom”.