Andrew Day on why conservatives should oppose the deportation of Khalil Mahmoud

The arrest and possible deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, has galvanized the left and drawn criticism from liberals and civil libertarians. Even some neoconservatives have condemned the White House’s aggressive action earlier this month. MAGA conservatives should also oppose it. 

At least one prominent MAGA-friendly voice, the author Ann Coulter, has already spoken out against deporting Khalil, who was born in Syria.  “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” Coulter wrote last week on X.

Khalil, a green card holder whose wife is a U.S. citizen (and eight months pregnant), does indeed enjoy rights under the First Amendment.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that alien residents cannot be deported for political speech, including speech in support of groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government.  Notably, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the targeted alien held an “affiliation” with a subversive organization, judging that the claim relied on too loose a definition of that term.  The case, Bridges v. Wixon, is highly relevant to the controversy surrounding Khalil.

The Trump administration, in rescinding Khalil’s green card, invoked a 1952 immigration law to justify the move.  That statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, empowers the government to deport any lawful permanent resident whom the secretary of state deems a danger to U.S. foreign policy interests.  The White House has said that Khalil, through his protest activities at Columbia University, promoted antisemitism.  Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security said that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terror organization. 

These justifications are spurious.  The First Amendment does not carve out an exception for speech that Marco Rubio labels “antisemitic,” and in any case Jewish students at Columbia have vouched for Khalil’s character.  As for the vague assertion that Khalil is “aligned” with Hamas, the administration has not produced evidence that he was affiliated with the group in any meaningful sense.  If the arrest of Khalil is legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, then the relevant provisions of that law are null and void under the Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

~ Andrew Day, "Mahmoud Khalil, Viewed From the Right: MAGA should oppose the arrest and deportation of the pro-Palestinian activist," The American Conservative, March 19, 2025

Jeremy Hammond on protesters using "from the river to the sea" as a slogan

This reminds me of the whole "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" slogan that they've been chanting and the media keep hammering on how the U.S. Congress and House keep passing resolutions defining that as antisemitic.  Well, that's just so utterly stupid.  Not to say that there aren't people who chant that who [are] antisemitic, but most of these kids on college campuses who are chanting the slogan "from the river to the sea," they're not advocating the slaughter of Jews in Israel.  They're advocating a single-state solution in which all people have equal rights.  They're opposing the apartheid regime.  And that's what they mean when they say "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."  

The other thing that renders that accusation that that's "antisemitic" so stupid is that if you look at the charter of Likud, the party of current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they use essentially the same slogan saying "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there will be only Israeli sovereignty."  Evidently Hamas plagiarized from Likud.

~ Jeremy Hammond, "Scott Horton and I Explain How Israel Supported Hamas," Jeremy R. Hammond Blog, 8:40 mark, May 17, 2024

Scott Horton on calling leftist antiwar protesters antisemitic

There's this more important narrative that they [the mainstream media] needs to hammer home, which is that the only ones who oppose Israel oppose them for no good reason, only because of antisemitism... which is a ridiculous hoax.  Just on the face of it, you don't have to give leftist protesters that much credit.  I'm sure they're bad on a lot of things, but nobody thinks that they're racists, right?  That's the crisis of our age, it's that they're so anti-racist that they won't leave anyone alone just for going about their day, right?  But now, all of a sudden, they're the Nazis.  They're supposed to be to the right of the right wing in America now.  Who could buy that?  It just sounds so stupid.

~ Scott Horton, "Scott Horton and I Explain How Israel Supported Hamas," Jeremy R. Hammond Blog, 7:50 mark, May 17, 2024

New York Times: anti-globalism = antisemitism

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews.  But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots. 

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in. 

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.”  “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats.  The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions. 

This language is hardly new — Mr. Soros became a boogeyman of the American far right long before the ascendancy of Mr. Trump.  And the elected officials now invoking him or the globalists rarely, if ever, directly mention Jews or blame them outright.  Some of them may not immediately understand the antisemitic resonance of the meme, and in some cases its use may simply be reflexive political rhetoric.  But its rising ubiquity reflects the breaking down of old guardrails on all types of degrading speech, and the cross-pollination with the raw, sometimes hate-filled speech of the extreme right, in a party under the sway of the norm-defying former, and perhaps future, president. 

In a July 2023 email to supporters, the Trump campaign employed an image that bears striking resemblance to a Nazi-era cartoon of a hook-nosed puppet master manipulating world figures: Mr. Soros as puppet master, pulling the strings controlling President Biden. 

~ Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Alex Lemonides, "How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel," The New York Times, May 9, 2024

Alan Futerman on anti-Zionism and antisemitism

You could say that anti-Zionism is different from anti-Semitism, but now, after the state of Israel exists and you have one-third of the Jewish people living in Israel - more even - and it's the Jewish state and you read the Jewish books and the Jewish calendar is followed and the Jewish language is spoken and every Jew is related in one way or another with the state of Israel, etc., you cannot be against the only Jewish state in the world and not be antisemitic.  So I think the distinction has to be made between those things: to say, "ok, theoretically you could be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic," but today the practical consequences of making the state of Israel to disappear would be the mass murder of an important part of the Jewish people.

~ Alan Futerman, "Is Zionism a Libertarian Movement?," (interview with Gilad Alper), 1:16:00 mark, May 18, 2024

Neil Rogall on Truman supported Jewish immigration to Palestine after WWII

By 1945 the US government fully supported the Zionists.  They knew how important oil had been in war and were keen to have reliable allies in the Middle East.  The news of the death camps in Germany led to worldwide sympathy for the Jews.  The Zionists used this to bolster their demands.  President Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman put pressure on the British to allow all Jewish holocaust survivors to be sent to Palestine.  The British refused.  This wasn’t sympathy on Truman’s part.  Most camp survivors wanted to go to the USA. But Truman was an openly racist and anti-Semitic politician who had only been chosen as Roosevelt’s running mate to placate southern 'Dixiecrats.'  Truman was opposed to letting Jewish refugees into the US. However, in 1947, the Zionists won a key propaganda battle.  The Exodus, a packed refugee ship was sent back from Palestine to Germany.  Much western opinion saw this as an inhuman act.

~ Neil Rogall, "Making the Palestinians the scapegoats for Nazi crimes," rs21, October 9, 2014

Harry Truman with Israeli President Chaim Weizmann

Jordan Peterson on antisemitism as a canary in the coalmine

I'm also more sensitive to any signs of antisemitic catastrophe from studying the Holocaust for the length of time that I did.  I've always regarded Jews as the canary in the coalmine and I think the reason that the Jews are the canary in the coalmine is because they're a successful minority.  If a culture can tolerate a successful minority, it's pretty damn robust and it's not very resentful.  And as soon as a culture starts to get resentful, the Jews make an easy target...

~ Jordan Peterson, interview with Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan Uncensored, 4:20 mark, November 3, 2023

Noam Chomsky on Christian evangelical support of Israel

Let's start with what's called conservative support [of] Israel.  At first I think some kind of semantic hygiene is useful.  There's really no conservative in the United States.  The people who are called conservatives are radical statists for the most part.  And there are few genuine conservatives - which means something like classical liberals - but not many.

If you take a look at the Republican Party today, which is the strongest extreme support for Israeli policies, they have a popular base.  A large part of the popular base is Christian evangelicals.  They are passionate supporters of Israeli policies and they're also extreme anti-Semites.  They don't say it, but take a look at the doctrines like the dispensationalist doctrines.  They're looking forward to a battle and Armageddon where everybody gets murdered and the saved souls rise to heaven.  What happens to the Jews?  Well, according to some of these versions, 160,000 of them find Christ in time and they're saved.  The rest are condemned to eternal damnation.  How can you be any more antisemitic than that?

Their support for Israel is because partly interpretation of the Bible, interpretation of the Book of Revelation and son on and so forth, which leads them to strongly support Israeli crimes.  Israel welcomes the support, but it also tries to control them.  Like when they try to blow up the Temple Mount, Israel doesn't think that's a good idea so they block them.

~ Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky: Why America Holds Israel as a Sacred Cow?," Free Will, 0:40 mark, October 26, 2023

Tom Woods on right wing cancel culture regarding criticism of Israel

It's very hard to talk about this [Israel-Palestine conflict] because the names get thrown around.  The right wing, they hate cancel culture, right?  No they don't!  They love it.  And they love having their own racism.  They love antisemitism.  Everybody's an anti-Semite.  If you're three degrees north of Ben Shapiro, you're an anti-Semite.  I would assume people know what's going on there.  This is just an attempt to ruin and destroy people...

I guess it would be antisemitic to point this out, but I think it's unavoidable that if you're Isreal [with 9 million people] and they're surrounded by hundreds of millions of potential enemies, hundreds of millions of people who may not be inclined to their direction.  Now how that was supposed to work in the long run - and I know that the Zionists' side will say, "but we've been so conciliatory, look where it's gotten us" - how was this going to work without some kind of meeting of the minds here?  Was it just going to be that the U.S. was just going to keep bankrolling them forever?  Even the U.S. can't ultimately, in the long run, fix a problem in which 9 million people are surrounded my hundreds of millions who hate their guts.  Some other kind of approach had to be taken and it never was.  I don't see what's antisemitic about pointing that out.  That would seem to be the most common sense thing you have to say in this situation.

~ Tom Woods, "Ron Paul Institute Director on Best and Worst Middle East Scenarios," The Tom Woods Show, 11:30 mark, November 1, 2023