On Columbia in the crosshairs
The world is complicated, and the following things can all be true:
(1) Trump and his minions would love to destroy American academia, to show their power, thrill their base, and exact revenge on people who they hate. They will gladly seize on any pretext to do so. For those of us, whatever our backgrounds, who chose to spend our lives in American academia, discovering and sharing new knowledge—this is and should be existentially terrifying.
(2) For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. (If you think this is all made up, please read pages 13-37 of the report—immediately after October 7, Jewish students singled out for humiliation by professors in class, banned from unrelated student clubs unless they denounced Israel, having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night, forced to move dorms due to constant antisemitic harassment—and then try to imagine we were talking about Black, Asian, or LGBTQ students. How would expect a university to respond, and how would you want it to? More recent incidents included the takeover of a Modern Israeli History class—guards were required for subsequent lectures—and the occupation of Barnard College.) Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.
(3) Having been handed this red meat on a silver platter, the Trump Education Department naturally gobbled it up. They announced that they’re cancelling $400 million in grants to Columbia, to be reinstated in a month if Columbia convinces them that they’re fulfilling their Title VI antidiscrimination obligations to Jews and Israelis. Clearly the Trumpists mean to make an example of Columbia, and thereby terrify other universities into following suit.
(4) Tragically and ironically, this funding freeze will primarily affect Columbia’s hard science departments, which rely heavily on federal grants, and which have remained welcoming to Jews and Israelis. It will have only a minimal effect on Columbia’s social sciences and humanities departments—the ones that nurtured the idea of Hamas and Hezbollah as heroic resistance—as those departments receive much less federal funding in the first place. I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.
(5) When an action stands to cause so much pain to the innocent and so little to the guilty, I can’t on reflection endorse it—even if it might crudely work to achieve an outcome I want, and all the less if it won’t achieve that outcome.
(6) But I can certainly hope for a good outcome! From what I’ve been told, Katrina Armstrong, the current president of Columbia, has been trying to do the right thing ever since she inherited this mess. In response to the funding freeze, President Armstrong issued an excellent statement, laying out her determination to work with the Education Department, crack down on antisemitic harassment, and restore the funding, with no hint of denial or defensiveness. While I wouldn’t want her job right now, I’m rooting for her to succeed.
(7) Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes:
(a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation
(b) Everything continues just like before
(c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was
Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.
Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.
I welcome comments with facts or arguments about the on-the-ground situation at Columbia, American civil rights law, the Trumpists’ plans, etc. But I will ruthlessly censor comments that try to relitigate the Israel/Palestine conflict itself. Not merely because I’m tired of that, the Shtetl-Optimized comment section having already litigated the conflict into its constituent quarks, but much more importantly, because whatever you think of it, it’s manifestly irrelevant to whether or not Columbia tolerated a climate of fear for Jews and Israelis in violation of Title VI, which is understandably the only question that American judges (even the non-Trumpist ones) will care about.
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Comment #1 March 9th, 2025 at 7:37 am
Controversial opinion: Humanities, social sciences, and other soft sciences, do not belong to universities anymore. Every serious college should abolish those departments or significantly downsize them (for example, admitting 1 philosophy student for every 10 math students).
A long time ago these departments had new things to discover and were adding value to society at large. These days they are just an easy way in for people who don’t want to miss out on the “college experience” and whose reasoning capacity is questionable in terms of university standards. As sciences, the discovered most (if not all?) of what useful there was to be discovered, so they need to be gone from the campus or at least get much smaller.
Furthermore, the non-rigorous nature of soft sciences, combined with the sort of people studying them, has given rise to various pathogenic ideas that have infested society as a whole. In an attempt to justify themselves as sciences, they need to keep publishing “new ideas”. However, since the useful material is already discovered, they are coming up with absurdities to justify their existence. There are no rigorous tests you can put these ideas in, like you would do in hard sciences. Just call your critics close-minded bigots stuck in the past and call it a day. There will be no meaningful resistance from the inside, since your students do not have strong reasoning skills to begin with.
Comment #2 March 9th, 2025 at 7:45 am
Ranter #1: As someone who’s spent his entire life in STEM, I’m gonna disagree. I have wonderful colleagues in history, English, music, and philosophy from whom I’ve learned a lot, and who in many cases have been as horrified by the violent protesters as I am. Short Fiction and The Art of the Essay were two of the best courses I took as a student, and the most useful to me. And where do you draw the line anyway: is analytic philosophy “STEM” or “humanities”? What about economics? Cognitive science?
Comment #3 March 9th, 2025 at 8:15 am
Dear Scott,
What I keep seeing is too much fixation on the case of the day and too little consideration of the larger question — What are the consequences of allowing self-serving power whores like Felon47, Muskolini, along with the Moron Majorities of Congress and SCOTUS anoint themselves the moral watchdogs of Academe, Scholarship, Education, the Press, and the whole sphere of Public Information?
Failing to think about that is one of the reasons I see so many people today talking like, “Sure they’re Nazis, but they’re Our Nazis …”
Regards,
Jon
Comment #4 March 9th, 2025 at 8:25 am
I think you should say more explicitly that Trump, Musk, etc are obviously acting in bad faith here. They do not care about Jewish students at all, and in fact have spent the last decade cozying up/dogwhistling to genuine Nazis at pretty much every opportunity. This is an excuse to try to destroy a great university because they don’t like universities, nothing else. The only reason they are using this particular issue is that it divides the left in a rather unique way, which makes it harder for us to fight back.
Comment #5 March 9th, 2025 at 8:26 am
Jon Awbrey #3: Those are important questions that haven’t escaped my notice.
A common problem that a blogger like me has is that, when (by my lights) there’s no moral ambiguity or complexity, there’s also very little to write about. I’ve condemned Trumpism and everyone associated with it a thousand times on this blog, I’ll condemn them a thousand more times, and what good has it done?
Comment #6 March 9th, 2025 at 8:28 am
I’m not sure your analysis of the grant situation is accurate. From what I’ve found, engineering, biology, and medicine may be hit hard, but our colleagues in theory (as well as general CS, mathematics, etc.) rely on NSF grants, which are not currently subject to sanctions. The impact on Columbia will affect the university as a whole and will certainly influence the humanities and social sciences as well.
Comment #7 March 9th, 2025 at 8:30 am
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14418
Everyone should keep in mind that there are a lot of lies going around about events at Columbia. University administrators and others have decided not to try and defend the institution publicly against these lies, because if you do so you get accused of being an antisemite and become a target.
Fascism has come to power in the US and is on the march worldwide, fueled by endless lies. We now have a dictator ruling by illegal decrees designed to try and destroy his enemies and put his supporters in control of everything. If you hate Columbia and are gleeful this is happening to us, keep in mind that you may be next.
Comment #8 March 9th, 2025 at 8:43 am
With friends like these… Like so many moderates, you complain all the time about changes you’d like to see in the world, but the second someone actually goes and tries to effectuate that change — entirely within the bounds of constitutional power and past Federal civil rights enforcement precedent — you can’t endorse it! “They don’t act on my behalf!” They do, Scott. They act on behalf of all people who think Universities should be places of learning and not places of violence and discrimination. It would be nice to see you praise this, but instead you disavow it.
Anyway … the people hit hardest by this aren’t just the STEM departments, but also the administrators . They get money from Federal grants as well. I am totally past hope that we could convince the sociology majors to stand down. But we could convince those who are capable of jettisoning the entire sociology department, or at least cracking down swiftly on troublemakers and refusing to coddle these terrorist-endorsing faculty with “negotiations”. That seems a worthy goal and entirely in line with Civil Rights enforcement norms.
Daniel #4
This administration is 100% unabashedly pro-Israel. You might think they’re acting in bad faith, but you don’t need to hallucinate that this very targeted action against Columbia is a shot across the bow before hitting all universities. It is entirely within their pro-Israel interests to stop universities from coddling Hamas-supporters on their campuses.
Comment #9 March 9th, 2025 at 8:48 am
[…] This is extremely […]
Comment #10 March 9th, 2025 at 8:59 am
Daniel Harlow #4: Plausibly you’re right. If Columbia cracks down in a way that fully satisfies its own antisemitism task force, and the government still doesn’t restore the funding, then I’ll say you were definitely right.
I find it impossible to know what really motivates Trump, Musk, and those in their orbit. But I’d say: if any of them were genuinely motivated by philosemitism, or Zionism, or contempt for Hamasniks, I’d appreciate it, but I still wouldn’t want them to express their “love” by destroying American academia, where I’ve spent my life. Thanks but no thanks. Also please cut out the Nazi shit.
I would also say: those of us in the anti-Trump resistance should never, ever, ever hand our enemies such an easy winning issue, by displaying the slightest tolerance or equivocation when faced with those in our own ranks who say “Al-Qassam you make us proud,” “be grateful I’m not out there killing Zionists,” “we want all of ‘48,” “go back to Poland,” and “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud.” Fetterman, Torres, and Shapiro are examples of Democrats who fully get this.
Comment #11 March 9th, 2025 at 9:15 am
I take comfort in the fact that Trump at least, if not all in his orbit, seems to have some appreciation for e.g. MIT (i.e., his very recent request that air traffic controllers be hired from there, his fondness for his uncle, etc.) So perhaps some small aspects of academia and the hard sciences remain appreciated by the administration.
Comment #12 March 9th, 2025 at 9:28 am
If Peter Woit finds this post “depressing,” then I, in turn, am depressed that Peter’s response is completely to deny the reality of the problem, and thus (in effect) to call his own university’s antisemitism task force a bunch of liars. If this is perceived to be the Columbia faculty’s answer, it will strengthen rather than weaken the government’s hand. Why hand the Trumpists a moral victory—isn’t their temporal victory bad enough?
Comment #13 March 9th, 2025 at 9:31 am
On the positive side: the fact that, within the first few comments, I’ve already been strongly criticized from both sides, suggests that I managed to hit the narrow target I was aiming at!
Comment #14 March 9th, 2025 at 9:42 am
Scott #12
If your goal is really to take the center on this issue, I guess we disagree more than I thought. I have no trouble seeing which side of this issue I agree with more.
Comment #15 March 9th, 2025 at 9:51 am
Anonymous Ocelot #14: My goal is never to “take the center”; it’s to be right—to capture all the moral nuances correctly. It’s just that, when you do that, you almost always do get criticized by both sides. (Of course, you can also get criticized by both sides and be wrong.)
Comment #16 March 9th, 2025 at 9:54 am
Re point #4 in Scott’s post: the social science and humanities departments certainly receive much less federal funding per faculty member than the hard science departments do. But they also have much lower costs per faculty member (essentially just labor, maybe some travel and computing). Do the social science and humanities departments receive less federal funding as a percentage of their total budget? It seems to me that that’s the more relevant measure of how dependent a department is on federal grants. (That’s a genuine question; I don’t know much about how humanities departments are funded.)
Comment #17 March 9th, 2025 at 9:57 am
Scott #2: I never said that soft sciences have nothing to teach, I said they have little to nothing more to discover. Since they do not advance humanity’s intellectual capabilities, they cannot claim to be sciences and, therefore, they do not belong in the universities.
I am sure you enjoyed some of the courses offered by the humanities department, and so did I when I was a young student, but please don’t overextrapolate these courses to the usefulness of the entire department. A few great courses in a sea of nonsense do not justify the existence and support of these departments (in addition to the societal damage they cause, as I mentioned in the last comment #1).
The great courses you attended can be offered by other departments. For example, the analytic philosophy can be offered by the math department, where, in my opinion, the students can better appreciate it.
I don’t see the meaning in categorising courses as “more STEM” or “more humanities”. I focus on the overall societal impact of a department and, in my opinion, the humanities departments have recently gotten an abysmal record. This is why I am of the opinion that they should be either abolished or drastically downsized. Whatever valuable courses they still offer can be transferred to other departments.
By the way, economics is half mathematics and half politics. I am not sure if it is a science or a trade, but it is certainly useful.
Comment #18 March 9th, 2025 at 10:15 am
Scott has this one right.
Sometimes in politics you will share a view with people whose views you otherwise dislike and whose tactics you oppose. That doesn’t make the view wrong, or mean you have to change your mind. Opposing Trump and Trumpism is fine, but what they call Trump Derangment Syndrome is real, and it is counterproductive. For example, to my mind, the shuttering of DEI programs is certainly an overreaction, but a welcome one in response to the insanity that held a death grip on campus discourse and even academic freedom in some disciplines. There have been other destructive embedded orthodoxies on campus as well. Elite anti-semitism is one of them. These authoritarian socially and administratively enforced orthodoxies are not easy to dislodge, and it won’t necessarily be pretty to do so.
Comment #19 March 9th, 2025 at 10:27 am
Peter Woit, the fact that you do not clearly see harassment or violence does not mean that it isn’t a problem. Even if one in a thousand students is attacked in a day, it is a serious problem. And the fact that you-know-who indeed does shameful things does not change the facts, whatever they may be, about lawlessness at the universities.
Comment #20 March 9th, 2025 at 10:47 am
Whatever you think of Columbia’s actions, I worry far more about the precedent of using the threat of cutting funds to change a university’s behavior. It might start with antisemitism but will quickly go to DEI, the LGBTQ community and anything else that doesn’t fit the administration’s “priorities”.
Comment #21 March 9th, 2025 at 11:00 am
Lance Fortnow #20: For better or worse, the US already crossed that bridge decades ago, when it started using the threat of cancelled grant funds to enforce a whole panoply of DEI policies at universities—even including, e.g., “students accused of sexual assault must not have the right to cross-examine their accusers” (the 2011 Dear Colleague letter). I’m sympathetic to the argument that the government should never use such a threat, but once it’s used, it’s hard to defend the proposition that it should be used for everything other than discrimination against Jews and Israelis.
Comment #22 March 9th, 2025 at 11:06 am
Scott, can you be clearer about the sort of speech you’d find acceptable versus unacceptable at Columbia or any other university when students/faculty have disagreements like this? There are rules against harassment, and sure, Columbia should enforce them, but as you hopefully agree, saying things that are deeply hurtful or offensive even to people who’ve been marginalized throughout history, is not a priori speech that should be censored or punished. For example, do you think an utterance like “Israel’s founding was unjust and should never have happened” should be protected?
Comment #23 March 9th, 2025 at 11:20 am
John #22: Columbia, like most universities, already has rules governing the time, place, and manner of protests. What I and others have wanted has simply been for existing rules actually to be enforced in a content-neutral way.
As one example, making an academic argument that “Israel’s founding was unjust” would be completely protected—especially if it were accompanied by any proposal for what to do now, that didn’t amount in practice to “more October-7-style ‘resistance,’ until all the Jews have fled or been exterminated.”
By contrast, blockading parts of campus, disrupting classes, and chanting “Khaybar ya Yahud,” “Al-Qassam you make us proud,” or other slogans that glorify violence against Jews would be considered unprotected vandalism, disruption, and harassment, meriting suspension or expulsion.
Comment #24 March 9th, 2025 at 11:34 am
Won’t the name “Office of Institutional Equity” be red meat to MAGA?
Comment #25 March 9th, 2025 at 11:46 am
Scott #23: I hear you, but it’s a little more complex than that. Some amount of disruption, even at a level which violates the rules, has traditionally been tolerated at universities for good reasons having to do with their distinctive features and missions. When I was an undergrad at Harvard, students occupied University Hall for weeks demanding better pay for janitors, unquestionably violating university rules (as the university continually pointed out). No one was suspended or arrested or deported, however (and the movement eventually did achieve better pay–justified, in my mind). The question is about the level and kind of disruption. I don’t think teachers should be unduly burdened by protests in the task of teaching, for instance (so, no intrusions into classrooms). In the Columbia situation, I’m not sure exactly where the line is in terms of what slogans people are chanting, but the university when it comes to chanting that is not obviously leading to violence should err on the side of restraint.
In support of Peter Woit’s position, I also have a lot of friends–Jews and non-Jews–at Columbia, and the pretty consistent message I hear from them is that the media narrative (and certainly the right-wing narrative) of campus events has been completely overblown. Even more incorrect–again, according to my sources–is the notion that Columbia administrators have not been serious about combatting anti-semitism.
Regarding Trump’s actual aims here, it’s instructive to keep in mind that the people behind these policies, like the guy Max Eden who came up with the idea of slashing NIH IDC, have said that they want to destroy Columbia to set an example. Here is Eden: “To scare universities straight, [Education Sectetary] McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” You can read more from him on this here:
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/a-comprehensive-guide-to-overhauling-higher-education/
Comment #26 March 9th, 2025 at 12:16 pm
John #25: Of course this is complex! While, in some cases, universities might use their discretion to decline to prosecute rulebreakers, the point is that Title VI can prohibit them from doing so when the rulebreakers have the stated goal of intimidating certain members of the campus community—whether Blacks, gays, or “Zionists.”
And yes, of course I’m terrified that the Trumpists won’t stop at fighting antisemitism, but will use that as a pretext to dismantle universities entirely. That’s why I drew a very clear line in the sand: namely, whenever Columbia’s own antisemitism task force agrees that the administration is doing enough, I’ll agree that it’s doing enough. And I’ll regard any grant suspensions beyond that point as purely spiteful and punitive.
Comment #27 March 9th, 2025 at 12:34 pm
Scott #26: great, seems like we’re mostly in agreement, modulo my not having looked to see whether what the anti-semitism task force is asking for is reasonable. The only thing I’ll add is that many of the rule-breakers (including Jewish students) are not, to my understanding, acting according to a stated goal of intimidation. Rather, a lot of them have reasonable gripes about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians throughout history (you probably agree with some and disagree with others).
Comment #28 March 9th, 2025 at 12:53 pm
The problem with John’s (22,25,26) soft approach to rule-breaking by protesters is it will inevitably lead to preferential enforcement according to the popular campus orthodoxies of the day. So he says that he believes rules should be enforced (22), but then he says they really shouldn’t be enforced when he agrees with the cause (25). Then he says he agrees with everybody by eliding the entire issue (26). In a nutshell, that is the root cause of the argument here. It’s campus rope-a-dope.
Comment #29 March 9th, 2025 at 1:20 pm
Scott,
Can you explain why you trust the “antisemitism task force”? I don’t know how it was organized, but to use the example you gave, I don’t implicitly trust any of these organizations on campus that claim to represent LGBT when they make claims either. I assume all such organizations are heavily staffed by political activists with various interests that extend beyond or are totally unrelated to their stated goals.
You imply you would be fully satisfied with simply trusting the task force’s opinion on funding, but that would create a massive incentive for special interests (such as politicians or corporations) to place operatives in the task force. Can you explain how you would guard against these abuses?
I’m not questioning the existence of acts of discrimination, which I take as self-evident, merely the validity of various techniques of measuring levels of discrimination. It’s one thing to point out a long list of times people were mistreated, its another to claim things like “this campus/department has particularly high levels of bigotry compared to other institutions.”
Comment #30 March 9th, 2025 at 1:22 pm
Daniel Harlow #4,
This is an excuse to try to destroy a great university because they don’t like universities, nothing else.
I must disagree here. It is undeniable that Trump’s administration fully supports Israel as a strategic priority. Framing it otherwise is incorrect. Moreover, while Trump’s support for Israel is widely popular among Republican voters, it does face strong criticism from a 10%–15% fringe on the right.
We now find ourselves in an extremely dangerous global situation (not just for Jews): As far as I see, parts of the Far Right openly endorse Nazism and attempts to rehabilitate Hitler, using Jews and Israel as the usual scapegoats for the world’s problems (see on X). At the same time, large parts of the Far Left are openly supportive of violent Jihad, again, making Jews and Israel their convenient scapegoat—just as 20th-century Marxists did (see Columbia for example).
So, in this context, Trump’s position should be seen as that of a mainstream centrist one.
Comment #31 March 9th, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Peter Woit should have explained why this is post depressing. The reason that I find it depressing is because Trump and the GOP are explicitly correlating a university’s funding of basic sciences with an uncorrelated political function. Regardless of the game theoretic outcomes or the veracity of the claims of anti-semitism (as Woit claims) there’s the fact that this action is fundamentally changing the nature of funding away from the inherent function of the research to one that’s uncorrelated with it. Then, by simply arguing why you may or may not support this, you’ve implicitly accepted that this attack on the basic sciences is warranted.
Also, Kingsley Wilson is the deputy press secretary of the DOD. She loves Trump. Trump hates anti-semites. Kingsley frequently tweets grotesquely anti-semitic content. A few examples are here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/dod-deputy-press-secretary-history-tweets-racist-antisemitic-conspirac-rcna195005
Then, why hasn’t Wilson been fired? A guess: it’s not about the anti-semitism.
Comment #32 March 9th, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Well, maybe the agreement was premature. I’m not convinced by what I read in the task force note that Columbia has done anything that warrants this kind of intrusion (and lots of their proposals, e.g. more trainings, are just not going to work, just as they haven’t worked in other realms). Mistakes were made, sure, but the response seems completely disproportionate. Columbia and other universities needs to stand up to Trump rather than accept his framing of campus events. The main threat, which will be much pervasive than the threat to Jewish students on campus, is that all kinds of legitimate speech will be chilled.
Comment #33 March 9th, 2025 at 1:41 pm
John #27:
The only thing I’ll add is that many of the rule-breakers (including Jewish students) are not, to my understanding, acting according to a stated goal of intimidation. Rather, a lot of them have reasonable gripes about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians throughout history (you probably agree with some and disagree with others).
In that case, the protesters had a responsibility to police their own ranks, and expel those who glorified violence or called to “globalize the intifada” (ie, intimidate Jews everywhere in the world). Not only did they conspicuously fail to do this, but many of the worst violence glorifiers, such as Khymani James and Nerdeen Kiswani, were leaders and organizers of the protests. That is the issue.
Comment #34 March 9th, 2025 at 1:42 pm
@Diogenes #28: well, how do you feel about this non-soft approach (via Peter Woit):
“Plainclothes ICE officers are in the Columbia neighborhood, arresting at least one green-card holding pro-Palestinian activist outside his university residence and taking him to prison. Such officers do not have judicial warrants, are acting at the instruction of Trump’s DOJ. The university-provided guidance about such agents is here.”
Here’s the Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-authorities-arrest-palestinian-student-protester-columbia-university-students-2025-03-09/
Comment #35 March 9th, 2025 at 1:47 pm
Scott,
I hear this “you have to police your group” language a lot in political discussions, but nobody every explains what they actually expect a group to do. Movements/causes are not political parties. There is no formal means to ensure bad people do not join in.
If someone agreed with you on one issue, but also held some reprehensible point of view, what mechanism would you use to ensure that none of the people in your protest held the reprehensible point of view? Be precise. “Oh, I would denounce them” doesn’t cut it. That’s not going to stop a reprehensible person from joining a protest. People with extremist views always try to join mainstream protests for attention.
Comment #36 March 9th, 2025 at 1:47 pm
Sam #31: Didn’t you read my comment #21? This particular horse left the barn decades ago! The federal government has long used Title VI to tie research funding to political goals, including instituting sexual assault regimes that led to hundreds of lawsuits for expelling innocent students and violating their due process rights. So, it seems to me that one can either stand consistently against all of this, or not. I don’t see a good argument for tying research funding to Title VI antidiscrimination goals when and only when the victims (alleged victims?) strike someone as being on the correct political side.
Comment #37 March 9th, 2025 at 1:49 pm
@Diogenes: and no, your description of my positions is wrong. I said universities should enforce their rules about harassment. Less clear for other kinds of disruptions (tents). I was making the distinction because Scott brought up several different things—tents, blockades, damaging property, chants, etc.
Comment #38 March 9th, 2025 at 2:06 pm
John and like-minded people:
Imagine a trend of “men’s rights” activists in masks walking around Columbia shouting slogans like “Her mouth says no, her eyes say yes!” and “She resists now, but she’ll thank you later!”, and even taking over parts of the campus, denying access to women unless they affirm their dedication to “putting out”. How do you think Columbia (a) would, and (b) should respond to this?
Comment #39 March 9th, 2025 at 2:21 pm
>* Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it.*
Scott, you need to improve your perception of symmetry here. I would not advise *anybody* to go to Columbia, because becoming a complicit or slightly benefiting bystander causes as much moral damage as being a victim causes material damage. Would we (I’ll actualize Godwin’s law because what’s coming is a great analogy) tell German-speaking undergraduates in 1939 that they will probably be O.K. if they study in Leipzig? That’s where the idea of special circumstances leads, as opposed to the much better principle of universality.
Comment #40 March 9th, 2025 at 2:32 pm
Vladimir #38: that would be bad, and the analogue of that sort of harassment in the Palestine/Israel context shouldn’t be tolerated. But once again, according to the many people I know who work at Columbia, both Jewish and non-Jewish, the scenario you describe is not comparable to what was happening in reality (which is not to say that this sort of harassment didn’t happen at all). Furthermore, Columbia has very clearly cracked down in the months since–the campus has been closed for a good while now. What Trump is doing is disproportionate and probably illegal (the clear First Amendment violation I posted about in #34 is certainly illegal).
To Scott #33: as Benjamin #35 points out, it’s not clear whether something like you’re suggesting is possible–it’s not how movements/protests work.
And to Scott #31, who wrote “The federal government has long used Title VI to tie research funding to political goals, including instituting sexual assault regimes that led to hundreds of lawsuits for expelling innocent students and violating their due process rights. So, it seems to me that one can either stand consistently against all of this, or not.”
Yes, and that was wrong (I’m not one of those people who was cheering these kinds of due process violations in that setting but am now hypocritically advocating for restraint–I’ve been pissed about those things too!). I prefer the option of standing consistently against all of this.
Comment #41 March 9th, 2025 at 2:43 pm
I don’t think the presence of antisemitism, or other misconduct, at Columbia, should warrant the removal of federal grants. It is really important to have a federal government that follows laws as well as internal administrative procedures. So if they have a policy for, say, research grants, they should follow those. We really do not want a country in which the US president has broad discretion over whether to cancel federal funding for things.
I am not trying to say anything either way about the antisemitism situation at Columbia. The point is that this is wrong way to address it. And if you say “well, they did it in a way that stretches the rules, but they have some good points about antisemitism” then you provide them cover for moving America closer to dictatorship. The same issue happened when they illegally ended USAID grants and then people would say “well, they shouldn’t have done it, but some of the USAID project _were_ inefficient.”
Think about what happens when a criminal is arrested and evidence is illegally obtained. Say it’s pretty clear they did the crime but the police violated the 4th amendment in getting their evidence. They end up acquitted because we understand that it’s better to underenforce laws than to let the police and prosecutors imprison people without following the rules.
The answer to all of these funding cuts is that they violate separation of powers, as well as many statutes, and that we need to resist them if we don’t want to end up governed by Russia.
Of *course* they will test it by starting with the places where they are most popular. e.g. USAID is the agency with probably the least political constituency, Columbia is probably the easiest to attack in terms of antisemitism, etc. But every win they get will make the next win easier. “First they came from the socialists, etc.”
Now if they proposed a new antisemitism regulation, went through the Administrative Procedures Act, etc. that would be another story. Then we could talk about the merits of fighting antisemitism in this way. But in this case the big story is the power grab.
Comment #42 March 9th, 2025 at 2:57 pm
Sorry, one more thing. I realize that Title VI prohibits discrimination in higher ed. I have no idea how it applies in this case but my guess is that there is a legal process for accusing a university. Just like when we accuse a criminal, there should be a legal process for accusing a university of discrimination, and this process is IMO more important than making sure we nail all the guilty ones.
More generally, in the ‘democracy vs fascism’ debate, part of the argument for fascism is that democracies move too slowly because of their procedural niceties. After all, we all know the guy is guilty, let’s just put him in jail.
Comment #43 March 9th, 2025 at 3:56 pm
John:
From your post:
“When I was an undergrad at Harvard, students occupied University Hall for weeks demanding better pay for janitors, unquestionably violating university rules (as the university continually pointed out). No one was suspended or arrested or deported, however (and the movement eventually did achieve better pay–justified, in my mind).”
This is the problem I am trying to draw attention to in this discussion. Special protest rights for causes you like.
Comment #44 March 9th, 2025 at 4:04 pm
According to 2025 FIRE free speech ratings, only Harvard is worse than Columbia. A Columbia student wrote a book “While Time Remains” where she compares Columbia to North Korea, her native country. Probably a fraction of STEM departments are worth saving. But wars are messy and destructive. To avoid getting involved in political wars, universities should have remained apolitical. They preferred to cancel those who warned.
Comment #45 March 9th, 2025 at 4:56 pm
I need to clarify a few things as someone here at Columbia like Peter Woit:
1.The frozen grants are almost all NIH grants and things like Fullbright grants. There are as far as I know no DOE (energy not education), NSF, or DOD funds frozen. Of course this may change soon.
2.The frozen grant # is I think(?) somewhat inflated. The 400K would appear to be based on the total grant award, not on remaining money. I could be wrong however because so far there has been no stop orders placed.
3.With respect to legality-I am not a lawyer-I had worried about this prior to the election. My understanding was that the government could not do this without a Title VI trial and judgement. But just like many other things like the 15% NIH overhead thing they seem to be doing things of dubious legal standing. I am sure there are lawyers on this right now.
4.I read Peter Woit’s piece on his blog. I think everyone is going to have their own opinion on what has happened here. I agree with him there is a lot of inaccurate things stated about what has happened over the last 1.5 years. On the other hand, it is hard to argue against the fact that indeed a reasonable case can be made that pro-Israel students have felt harassed and uncomfortable here, and there are a lot of them on campus. How much of that constitutes a Title VI violation by the letter of the law I have no idea (I thought one has to demonstrate willful discrimination on the part of the school, and I do not think that is the case). The issue is more that the school doesn’t really know how to respond. In particular…
5.Actually, there are NO time place and manner restrictions that are specific. There were more specific ones, but the senate replaced them with more vague statements about noise and class or sleeping disruptions. This was a mistake, I think. Further unlike, say, the University of Chicago, we do not have a real security force that can do anything. So, it is NYPD or nothing-which is a bad situation.
6.Now some really creepy things are happening. There is ICE walking around in plain clothes searching for people they have identified on social media. One person who was a leader of the pro-Palestinian groups who is on a Green Card (graduated but living in Columbia housing) was arrested and separated from his 8-month pregnant wife and taken to holding in NJ for deportation. I was no fan of the protests, but I find this scary because as far as I know he has not been convicted of anything, so this seems very Orwellian.
Comment #46 March 9th, 2025 at 5:13 pm
@Diogenes #43: you picked a bad example. At the time, I thought it was silly and didn’t want to be a part of it, but I was still glad the university didn’t overreact and suspend (or worse) any of these students, in part because I knew some of them to be good, well-meaning people. It was only years later that I came to understand the protest as a positive thing.
Comment #47 March 9th, 2025 at 5:25 pm
Scott #10
Who is this directed towards? What Nazi shit are you talking about? Please be as specific as possible.
Comment #48 March 9th, 2025 at 5:31 pm
The numbers of 100, 50, and -1000 for options 7a, b and c seem wrong to me. Yes, in the short term it would be very painful for all the scientists at Columbia. But the research funds and the expertise don’t just vanish into the ether! They will find a home at other, more deserving institutions.
It strikes me as very miscalibrated to consider this outcome 20x worse than the difference between (a) and (b). The effects of (a) go way beyond Israeli students at this one institution. There’s a huge principal-agent problem in academia, where corrupt administrators pursue their own agendas on the public’s dime, leveraging the reputation of “their” institutions to spread destructive ideologies.
Overall, I share the principles and thought processes you’ve laid out here. But option (a) is easily worth +10k.
Comment #49 March 9th, 2025 at 5:53 pm
I was wrong in what I said above-there now have been some “stop work” orders placed on some grants. They seem to be targeting fields they don’t like, such as things related to climate, ecology, etc. Obviously, this is about more than anti-Semitism. And obviously I meant 400M not 400K above.
Comment #50 March 9th, 2025 at 6:32 pm
John #46:
What you are saying exactly proves my point.
Comment #51 March 9th, 2025 at 6:49 pm
@Diogenes #50: I mean, no. You said I was in favor of special protest rights for causes I liked. I said I supported the university’s restraint during a time when I didn’t like the cause. But anyway, things have changed since Scott made this post. Did you read where the administration has arrested a green card holder (and is now saying they’re going to revoke his green card status and deport him) for…well, they haven’t said what exactly…but sounds like it’s for speech that is protected under the First Amendment? Is that the kind of reaction you support?
Scott, where are you on this latest development?
Comment #52 March 9th, 2025 at 6:53 pm
@John:
I was a grad student at Harvard in the 1980s. I think I was paid like $600 a month. I support more pay for grad students and other university workers (within reason). However if a group of students protesting for this took over the Library or another University building I would support them being suspended or expelled depending on the circumstances. Campus is not a place for riot and lawlessness.
Comment #53 March 9th, 2025 at 7:35 pm
John #51: I’d prefer to have more facts before passing judgment on the legality or morality of this. But here are some possibly relevant points from news reports:
– Mahmoud Khalil was not some random green card holder, but one of the leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which is pretty extreme even by the standards of anti-Israel groups and openly advocates for the killing of Israelis.
– He was also an organizer of the illegal encampment.
– He understood that, by engaging in illegal activity, he was potentially jeopardizing his green card status (he said as much in interviews).
– Nevertheless, he’s already completed his graduate degree at Columbia. So, one of his options now is to return to his native Syria, which seems like a good place from which to continue waging intifada.
Comment #54 March 9th, 2025 at 7:50 pm
Scott #53: which of those bullet points makes you think that it might be OK to revoke his green card status and deport him? Was he charged with or convicted of a crime? No.
Comment #55 March 9th, 2025 at 7:53 pm
J.Fox at #19 and others, please read Dr. Woit’s post. He describes a lot of, probably expensive and rather inconvenient, new security procedures at what used to be an open campus. I didn’t read him as saying nothing bad happened there, but that a lot has been done to prevent such things from happening again.
Another way to make the bad behavior less likely is to educate college students in history and philosophy and literature, even if none of it is new. It is to new to those who have not learned it. Freshmen at my university had to take general English and Humanities courses. As an engineer. I found those courses very worthwhile, and I still use lessons learned there today. (The math and science I learned there was not new either.)
Comment #56 March 9th, 2025 at 7:54 pm
Sorry Scott-this is wrong, and you should know better. I was very much against the protests here and felt the university failed in not properly instituting rules, guidelines and punishment for violations. This continues to this day. However, Khalil never was convicted of anything, and I don’t think he was ever formally charged with anything. Please check what constitutes justification for having your Green Card revoked. It is generally for being convicted of serious offenses. If you can have your Green Card revoked for these kinds of infractions then we are all in a world of shit, and you surely know why. Rubio says it is for being a Hamas supporter. Unless they can prove he gave material support to or for Hamas this is a completely bunk reason.
Comment #57 March 9th, 2025 at 7:56 pm
John #54: I never said it was OK! I don’t know if it is. I’m not an expert in immigration law, and it’s a question to be argued in court. Given the notoriety of the case, I’m guessing he’ll have superb pro bono representation.
Let me be extremely clear: I want to see Khalil get all the rights he’s entitled to by law, even if he’s a leader in a political movement dedicated to the goal of murdering my family.
Comment #58 March 9th, 2025 at 7:59 pm
Trump doesn’t really care about antisemitism: we’ve seen he’s fully willing to support neo-Nazis whenever that helps him. Anyone who thinks he gives a damn about antisemitism at Columbia is naive. Trump is always self-serving. So to understand what’s going to happen next, we should think about how this activity will help Trump politically. There are some pretty obvious ways: it’s good to get universities to crack down on protests before anti-Trump protests even start, and his right-wing base will enjoy seeing eggheads get defunded.
Trump’s gang has threatened that after Columbia they will go after these other universities:
Harvard
George Washington University
Johns Hopkins University
New York University
Northwestern University
UC Los Angeles
UC Berkeley
University of Minnesota
University of Southern California
I expect to see an attention-grabbing drama which may last a while before the cuts actually occur, perhaps with hearings where university presidents are encouraged to grovel. We’ve seen a similar drama with the tariffs. By tackling Columbia first and threatening to look into the rest later, he can probably wring preemptive compliance from the others before he turns his Eye of Sauron on them.
Comment #59 March 9th, 2025 at 8:19 pm
John Baez #58: I agree that Trump almost certainly doesn’t care about antisemitism in itself! Like I said, the hard left idiotically handed Republicans the antisemitism issue on a silver platter, so they took it.
Indeed, this is the whole reason for all the moral nuances in this post! Because I’m fully cognizant of the inner monstrosity of Trump, he can only ever be my “ally” in the extremely limited sense that the T. Rex is the humans’ “ally” at the end of Jurassic Park, when it eats the velociraptors. Crucially, that isn’t followed by the humans trusting the T. Rex in any other situation.
Comment #60 March 9th, 2025 at 8:32 pm
It is worthwhile looking at the departmental home of the 100 or so Columbia faculty signing the letter in favor of student demonstrations about Gaza sent 30 October 2023. Here is a link to the full letter (if such things are permitted on your blog) — https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1cVLg6RTnqd2BTzuouWbfACnFEex7GQeImDZJnMlUReM/mobilebasic?pli=1
If not, the list contains
1 physicist
1 mathematician
1 MD
0 chemists
0 engineers
0 computer science
res ipsa loquitur
Comment #61 March 9th, 2025 at 8:44 pm
Having been through the dirty bicker at Princeton in 1958, and having performed my bar mitzvah on crutches because some kid broke my leg because I was Jewish, I know what antisemitism looks like.
“the hard left idiotically handed Republicans the antisemitism issue” — they did this because they ARE antisemitic.
Comment #62 March 9th, 2025 at 9:07 pm
When I worked at Google, there was a running joke that Columbia didn’t produce good software engineers compared to e.g. Brown, to the point where it almost wasn’t worth interviewing their graduates. Scott, you seem extremely focused on research, to the point where you’re willing to accept the university basically running a terrorist training camp on the side, and are accusing anyone trying to cut funding for this mess of acting in bad faith. Universities have menaced society in a number of ways. At the lower end, you have students of average or even below-average intelligence wasting 4–8+ years racking up debt, not paying taxes, and studying stuff they’re not smart enough to understand while being inculcated in radical political ideologies, who then expect high-paying jobs that don’t necessarily exist when they graduate. Now at the higher end, we have this “globalize the intifada” nonsense.
Ultimately, universities proved incapable of regulating themselves, so voters eventually stepped in and elected politicians who are now starting to intervene. I can only speculate as to Trump’s motives, but his own daughter Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married Jared Kushner and has three kids. (“What’s the difference between President Trump and a Reform Jew? Trump has Jewish grandkids.”) So Trump does actually have some personal interest in the situation.
The rising anti-semitism on the right (e.g. Candace Owens and Ian Carroll going on Theo Von’s and Joe Rogan’s podcasts) is not great, but to me, that’s not nearly as scary as the “best and brightest” learning these ideologies in what are supposed to be our nation‘s great institutions of learning and discovery (and which are also feeder schools for a lot of important jobs).
Comment #63 March 9th, 2025 at 9:10 pm
Sorry Scott, but I can`t help comparing your snarky comments about Khalil perhaps returning to Syria and your overall “let the law decide“ attitude with the posts about the Pinker fellowship controversy (“it`s an outrage!“), your defense of the right to offend, of that open letter about justice and open debate, your worry about cancel culture.
Khalil is being arbitrarily arrested and deported, something which goes way beyond what any of the “cancelled“ people went through. The Pinker letter just argued he did not deserve to receive a prize, and you treated it as the world`s greatest outrage and the end of liberalism!
Certainly none of the linguists who signed letters against him advocated his deportation, or Harvard firing or disciplining him.
I always suspected more than a whiff of hypocrisy around the “Campus free speech wars” and today we see it in its full force.
Some pople find some of Pinker`s past activity and association at least as offensive as you find Khalil`s ( Khalil making pro-Israelis feel unsafe on Campus? Reread the letter by the linguists, they basically said people of color and Sexual assault survivors would feel unsafe by an association that honored someone like him). Every canceller found every cancel culture victim equally offensive and objectionable.
And if Khalil`s deportation is a purely legal question, let us remember that every action usually associated with cancel culture was perfectly within the law,.
Can`t help feeling that your relative agreement with Pinker and other supposed victims of cancel culture w.r.t. Khalil is modulating your outrage about the wrongs that happen to them. It is understandable, but this attitude has nothing to do with the defense of free speech. Especially in current times.
Comment #64 March 9th, 2025 at 9:30 pm
@Ryan Landay #62: “Scott, you seem extremely focused on research, to the point where you’re willing to accept the university basically running a terrorist training camp on the side, and are accusing anyone trying to cut funding for this mess of acting in bad faith.”
Yeah…apparently “lower end” college students aren’t the only ones who’ve been inculcated in (charitably, arrived at) radical political ideologies…
That’s a funny joke, btw. Was it also a running joke that Harvard doesn’t produce engineers as good as those at Brown, cuz I’m guessing the hiring would tell a different story. Similar campus cultures though.
Comment #65 March 9th, 2025 at 9:32 pm
Trump doesn’t actually care about getting anything right. He’s not actually trying to punish Columbia for its anti-Semitism. He cares two hoots which depts are guilty.
He has no cause or ethics. He’s just trying to ransack the country and get out safely. He’d attack the opposite groups if he thought it helped him.
Andrew Sullivan has a great piece on him : The Bully in the Pulpit. On substack, in The Weekly Dish.
Comment #66 March 9th, 2025 at 9:33 pm
George #63: Steven Pinker, to the best of my knowledge, never engaged in violent protest, certainly not in a country where he was a temporary resident. Like him or not, he’s stayed firmly within the realm of the exchange of ideas and arguments, rather than choosing to leave that realm.
Comment #67 March 9th, 2025 at 9:36 pm
Scott #59 – I believe your discussion of these particular moral nuances is a distraction from the real crisis we face. I listed two things that Trump gains from defunding Columbia but I forgot a third. It serves to fragment the anti-Trump resistance, as we see happening in the discussion here. It’s a trap, cleverly laid by the Trump gang.
Comment #68 March 9th, 2025 at 9:44 pm
Scott #59: I chucked at that analogy (truly), but I seriously doubt that Trump will end up being your ally even in the narrow sense in which the T-rex is the humans’ ally against the raptors at the end of JP.
Comment #69 March 9th, 2025 at 9:50 pm
Scott#66
Again you are not paying attention. Khalil is not a temporary resident, he is a permanent resident. He also was not involved in the occupation at Hamiltonian and there is no evidence he himself protested in a violent manner.
Comment #70 March 9th, 2025 at 9:51 pm
@Scott #63: again, permanent resident. Permanent residents have (most of) the same constitutional protections that citizens do. Pinker may not have spewed ugly rhetoric or occupied buildings, but also the letter against Pinker was a much, much, MUCH lesser affront to liberal democracy and enlightenment ideals than the detention and planned deportation of Khalil based on the information available to us at the moment.
Comment #71 March 9th, 2025 at 10:04 pm
I think the following, from the DropSite article on Khalil’s arrest, is very telling. “Activities *aligned to Hamas.” That’s not what they’d say if there was evidence that he’d supported Hamas in any sort of material way. That’s exactly how they’d put it if they simply didn’t like the constitutionally-protected things he has said.
“On Sunday evening, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin sent a follow-up statement confirming ICE “arrested” Khalil “for activities aligned to Hamas”: “On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student,” McLaughlin wrote. “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.””
Comment #72 March 9th, 2025 at 10:07 pm
John #64: I worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2014–2016 and they had a lot of Harvard graduates back then, I think because the company was started at Harvard and a lot of the early employees knew people there. Google has more ties to Stanford. But those are both fairly small schools. Nowadays these companies run industrial hiring operations at top public universities. I’m not sure what’s going on at Meta but Google’s been laying people off to hire in other countries (Costa Rica, Mexico, India, etc.). I’m not sure if that reflects them going into extreme cost-cutting mode or if they think American college graduates are becoming less competitive and/or more difficult to deal with.
Re: “arriving at” radical political ideologies, this calls to mind the Zizian cult that’s alleged to have murdered four people and gotten two of their own killed (plus a couple suicides I think). I’m kind of interested in how they arrived at those beliefs, but I also kind of don’t really want to know, in case I find their arguments compelling. At some point you just need to arrest the ringleader and make it stop.
Comment #73 March 9th, 2025 at 10:18 pm
John #71:
Under US law, an alien (which includes green card holder) who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization” is deportable.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1227%20edition:prelim)
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1182%20edition:prelim)
Comment #74 March 9th, 2025 at 10:22 pm
John Baez #67:
I listed two things that Trump gains from defunding Columbia but I forgot a third. It serves to fragment the anti-Trump resistance, as we see happening in the discussion here. It’s a trap, cleverly laid by the Trump gang.
I’ve always supported the broadest possible coalition to defeat Trump—win or (alas) lose, in 2016, 2020, and 2024. It stands to reason (and game theory and political science confirm) that this broadest possible coalition would be moderate and centrist rather than far-left. From my perspective, then, it’s the far left that keeps sabotaging a strong anti-Trump coalition, by driving millions of people into Trump’s arms with its antics. And yet I’ll still join the coalition that includes the far left in every US election.
Comment #75 March 9th, 2025 at 10:42 pm
Why are science and math impacted by the freeze in federal funding, but not the humanities depts ?
I imagine Columbia has enough in endowments to keep the important depts going for 4 years atleast. Am I wrong?
Comment #76 March 9th, 2025 at 11:02 pm
Scott #67 – When I said this was a trap, I mean that a bunch of people here are now spending time talking about the demonstrations at Columbia, who is to blame for disrupting the coalition against Trump, etc., etc., rather than strategizing to do something about Trump. And this is exactly what he wants.
There are a lot of smart people here, and maybe they could figure out some interesting strategies if you asked them to.
Comment #77 March 10th, 2025 at 3:44 am
Hi Scott,
I believe the most reasonable solution would have been for the police to handle the harassments you described. It doesn’t make any sense that the university would have its own law system like it is Salem in the 17th century. I understand that Americans have a problem seeing police on campus ground, but obviously the alternative is worse (as well as Trump’s brutal correction).
Comment #78 March 10th, 2025 at 7:28 am
Qwerty#75-
the humanities basically do not receive grant funding to begin with. The humanities faculty by and large never even engaged with the dangers wrt to funding during the protests. One professor said at a university-wide faculty member “who cares if we lose grant funding?” They do lose out on fellowship holders from the Department of Education through this action-but I’d guess that is minor. And of course they will feel the pain because the university budget is largely centralized (our ICR goes to support their students). As I said before the administration seems to be taking the opportunity to target grants with subjects they don’t like within the sciences from this action.
Comment #79 March 10th, 2025 at 7:51 am
Boaz Barak has a good take on Khalil
https://x.com/boazbaraktcs/status/1898945657508860218
Comment #80 March 10th, 2025 at 8:51 am
Vladimir #73,
It looks like Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation, even if he is a green card holder, is at the discretion of the Attorney General of the US – Pam Bondi:
“Any alien (including an alien crewman) in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens” … and then goes on to quote the part of USC you did…
My guess is that he’s probably already been deported.
Comment #81 March 10th, 2025 at 9:26 am
“that the Trumpists won’t stop at fighting antisemitism, but will use that as a pretext to dismantle universities entirely.”
What we have here are the powerful pro-Israel lobbies stuck between a rock and a hard place, i.e. they can’t have their cake and eat it too:
they don’t need to try to get popular support (an impossible task when the whole world can plainly witness what’s actually happening) when they can buy out the government to align itself with them and squash free speech to forcefully shove their narrative down everyone’s throat… but then they shouldn’t act surprised once that fascist government uses the very same free speech suppression tactics to cancel the very things that made them powerful, like caring about science.
Comment #82 March 10th, 2025 at 9:47 am
Vladimir #73, Adam Treat #80: that part of the USC mentions “conditional” permanent residents. I’m not sure what that means. I’m not a lawyer, but Google and other sites tell me that permanent residents have the same rights to free speech and due process as US citizens. If that’s true, then it suggests that the Trump administration is claiming that Khalil’s offenses are such that a US citizen who did the same things could similarly be detained. That’s hard to believe, given what I’ve heard of Khalil’s activities.
Comment #83 March 10th, 2025 at 9:53 am
I think this statement, from a Jewish friend of mine, is exactly the right way to talk and think about this:
“As a Columbia graduate alum, I was angry enough by the Trump administration’s move to cancel all federal grants to Columbia last week, a move that will harm the students and researchers above all. (That was the goal, of course.) But I’m horrified beyond measure at the seizure and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident and soon-to-be father of an American citizen. I’m sure that I would have plenty of disagreements with Mr. Khalil regarding Israel/Palestine, and we might well have found ourselves on opposite sides of the protest lines. But the regime’s move to use a McCarthy-era immigration law to deport “subversives” – one that was expressly designed to target Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – is simply an attempt to terrorize and stifle all critics of the regime. If Mr. Khalil stands credibly accused of a crime, then he should be charged and tried by a jury, not “disappeared” in the night by jackbooted thugs. This is a move toward absolute fascism, and all people of good conscience – especially those of us in the Jewish community, whatever our views on Israel/Palestine – must stand up and oppose it.”
Comment #84 March 10th, 2025 at 10:09 am
John #82
Your Google skills seem strangely selective. Googling “US conditional permanent residents” immediately led me here:
https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/after-we-grant-your-green-card/conditional-permanent-residence
Since Mahmoud Khalil was recently on a student visa and he’s now married to a US citizen, his green card is in all likelihood marriage-based, i.e. conditional.
Comment #85 March 10th, 2025 at 10:28 am
Scott, I think that John Baez and others are correct and I agree with them in that this is not really about stamping down anti-semitism but about retribution and assertion of power. In fact, what Trump is doing to Universities (the general cut in IDC and freezing of funds across the board predates Columbia) can be mapped to what he is doing to groups, institutions, countries that he perceives as being oponents to his rule. I could list all the things he is doing in other fronts (Ukraine, Canada, Law Firms, etc.) but that would detract from the topic at hand.
Here, what Trump is doing to Columbia is a message to other universities (the elite ones) so they get in line, or they would have their funding cut. He is acting like a king (dictator?), demanding that everyone obeys in advance, or else. There are, apparently, no processes of any kind and the entire government of the US is just executing whatever crazy idea Trump and his minions come up with, regardless whether such ideas shift on a daily basis.
This situation is really bad and I predict that it will get really worse in the next months. The more people and institutions ‘bend the knee’, the more emboldened he will become. In the end, everything that goes on in this country will be based on whether it is aligned to Trump’s interests. If it isn’t, it will be gone. Right now some may celebrate what is happening to Columbia, but it is very likely that others will be next.
Comment #86 March 10th, 2025 at 10:29 am
John #82
Also, you’re simply misrepresenting the USC. The only part which mentions conditional permanent residents is the one that says they can be deported if the condition upon which they received their green card no longer applies. The terrorist activities clause is applicable to “any alien”, where alien is defined as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States” here:
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1101%20edition:prelim)
Comment #87 March 10th, 2025 at 10:41 am
While there is a case to be made about state overreach and due process, in the case of the radical antisemite Mahmoud Khalil—who, as far as I can tell, calls for the eradication of Israel and supports the Hamas-led October 7th massacre, having reportedly distributed posters of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza—I don’t think the case against the deportation of this extremist is very compelling.
As an example, it reminds me the debate surrounding the assassination of Osama Bin Laden (of course, these two case are different since Mahmoud Khalil has not been accused of committing terrorism on US soil, rather only inciting for terror, so his punishment is only deportation, which I find deserving). In the case of Bin Laden, president Obama decided to assassinate the terrorist and dispose of his body at sea. We can ask ourselves, and some have, whether Bin-Laden should have been brought to justice instead, but this theoretical debate does not mean that Obama’s decision was inherently or clearly wrong. It only shows that in any legal system, certain cases are so extreme or unusual that they do not fit neatly within the prescribed legal framework.
Comment #88 March 10th, 2025 at 10:41 am
Scott #53 names a specific individual and presents detailed allegations. I would love to hear similarly specific details about the “Nazi shit” mentioned by Scott #10. Given the concern about rising antisemitism and Scott’s claim to part of the “anti-Trump resistance”, I would think the slightest hint of Nazi activity coming from the Trump administration would be considered extremely alarming. Again, please clarify what you meant (preferably without any hints, innuendo, rhetorical questions, etc).
Comment #89 March 10th, 2025 at 10:57 am
John #83,
Yeah, I decline to adopt that way of thinking or talking about this. I think the above kind of demand is what Scott might have had in mind when he said:
“From my perspective, then, it’s the far left that keeps sabotaging a strong anti-Trump coalition, by driving millions of people into Trump’s arms with its antics.”
John Baez #76,
When a part of the coalition starts making broader and broader demands of what it must mean to be a part of the coalition, I agree T gets what he wants. The solution isn’t to stop talking about it, but for the coalition to get wise and stop making such demands don’t you think?
Comment #90 March 10th, 2025 at 11:19 am
Not only the US government can revoke green cards, but it can revoke citizenship obtained thru naturalization, one of the covered situations is this:
Membership or Affiliation with Certain Organizations
A person is subject to revocation of naturalization if the person becomes a member of, or affiliated with, the Communist party, other totalitarian party, or terrorist organization within five years of his or her naturalization.[6] In general, a person who is involved with such organizations cannot establish the naturalization requirements of having an attachment to the Constitution and of being well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.[7]
The fact that a person becomes involved with such an organization within five years after the date of naturalization is prima facie evidence that he or she concealed or willfully misrepresented material evidence that would have prevented the person’s naturalization
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-l-chapter-2
Comment #91 March 10th, 2025 at 11:57 am
Regarding Khalil, it seems useful to separate out the subquestions rather than conflating them:
Q1. Does the government have the legal authority to deport a conditional green card holder (for a pre-Trump definition of “legal”), without first convicting him of a crime?
Sounds like the answer is plausibly yes, for better or worse, although was the relevant authority last invoked in the McCarthy era?
Q2. Should the government have this legal authority?
Arguably in extreme cases, like membership in terrorist organizations. I would not want the government to have the authority to deport someone for (say) publishing a research paper that it disagreed with.
Q3. Has Khalil committed a crime?
He certainly wasn’t convicted of one. He certainly was a leader in organizations like CUAD whose members were arrested for many crimes.
Q4. Would deporting Khalil exert a chilling effect on academic speech?
If, as many predict, his deportation were followed by deportations of academics on green cards whose only offense was speech the government didn’t like, and who had no connection to illegal activity, then certainly the answer would be yes.
Q5. Even if he can be deported, is Khalil legally entitled to due process?
Q6. If so, is he receiving the due process to which he’s entitled?
On reflection, these are my biggest concerns. Even if a green card holder can be deported without a criminal conviction, I don’t want a world where they can be deported without some sort of legal proceeding, where he gets to appear with legal counsel, hear the specific grounds for deporting him, and make a case for why those grounds are false. I don’t know to what extent this is happening.
Comment #92 March 10th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
Nick Drozd #88: By Musk’s “Nazi shit,” I specifically meant
– Refusal to clarify after what making what looked a lot like a Nazi salute
– Support for European far-right parties with neo-Nazi connections
– Statements to the effect that Germany and other European countries should stop wallowing in historical guilt
– In general, failure to take the danger of Nazism seriously, to feel the crushing weight of it as I would with his paper. Treating it as a meme or a joke.
As I said before, all this is bad enough, without the need to believe that Musk has any literal desire to reconstitute the Third Reich.
Comment #93 March 10th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
Scott #91, it is quite clear that the radical antisemite Mahmoud Khalil is going to have his due process and would appeal his deportation decision. From what I’ve read, a person deported has the right to appeal before an immigration judge. On the other hand, it does seem that in this case, United States Secretary Marco Rubio’s decision was done lawfully, so his appeal may not be easy, as he seems to have been publicly endorsing designated religious terror groups.
Comment #94 March 10th, 2025 at 12:30 pm
Scott #91,
“On reflection, these are my biggest concerns. Even if a green card holder can be deported without a criminal conviction, I don’t want a world where they can be deported without some sort of legal proceeding, where he gets to appear with legal counsel, hear the specific grounds for deporting him, and make a case for why those grounds are false. I don’t know to what extent this is happening.”
Agreed. I would like a legal proceeding where the attorney general stands up and says why they believe it meets the standard. It should be judicially reviewable in other words. However, I’m not sure the current US code requires this to be judicially reviewable, but I’d support a change making it so.
I suspect that *isn’t* what is going to happen. I suspect they will have already deported him or removed him from the US. In which case, I imagine it’ll be hard for him to have a day in court or if it *does* get to a court room it might be there is no remedy.
Comment #95 March 10th, 2025 at 12:53 pm
Scott,
For someone so rational a lot of the time you really equivocate about the future state that is most likely following a warrantless arrest of a permanent resident holding a fully legal green card who has done nothing criminal under any statutes, even if you disagree with his opinions. I for one think it is pretty obvious where this goes, and you shouldn’t feel so conflicted to call out the flagrant flouting of the law. They are using your fears against you. Drawing small circles around what would be your redlines over such a thing is a tenuous position that falls into the camp of ‘they came for x and I said nothing’. If they do start coming for more people then it is already too late. Sadly, we don’t always get to be morally certain all the time before you do the right thing, that is just how reality works.
Can you at least agree that he deserves to have his lawyer know his location and discuss with him his situation?
Comment #96 March 10th, 2025 at 1:01 pm
I think it is a mistake to consider this one round game.
A US government imposing its will this way and u nondemocratically will have very bad implications long term. This all started with authoritarian left in academia and politics and have got us to authoritarian right in academia and politics.
You should consider the longer term and wider impact of these events rather than focus on the more local benefits arising from them.
That said, I cannot blame any minority person who feels under attack from grabbing to any branch to survive. But it typically does not end well to grab the hands of authoritarians.
Comment #97 March 10th, 2025 at 1:10 pm
The people talking about “appeal”, “due process”, and “following the law” clearly haven’t recalibrated yet to the new reality where 2/3 of the branches of government are now purely honorific, their only purpose is to legitimize the unconstitutional actions of the third branch, just like in Putin’s Russia.
Comment #98 March 10th, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Nate Montgomery #95:
Can you at least agree that he deserves to have his lawyer know his location and discuss with him his situation?
Yes, I absolutely, emphatically agree to that!
Please keep in mind that, given the explicit positions of the organization that he helps lead (CUAD), this is someone who we can presume would murder my entire family in Israel if he could. The deliberate burning alive of whole families in their homes on October 7, which CUAD enthusiastically supported, gives a model of what we could expect. Khalil’s colleague, Khymani James, says he’d murder all American Zionists as well—so, me, my wife, and my kids.
Given this, I feel like I’m fulfilling my duty to the Enlightenment, when I insist that Khalil get every single right that he’s entitled to under US law.
This is also the crucial difference from “First they came for the Jews”: in that case, people said nothing despite the fact that the Jews had never posed the slightest threat to them. In this case I am saying something—maybe not everything you want, but something—on behalf of an individual who’d plausibly kill my family if he could.
Comment #99 March 10th, 2025 at 1:24 pm
@Scott #91: good breakdown. Regarding Q4, “and who had no connection to illegal activity,” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and this administration simply cannot be trusted to interpret. That’s the way this will chill speech. And it’s already happening–it’s not a question of “if”. My friends and colleagues at Harvard and Columbia (especially in the social sciences) report that their students have been completely intimidated into silence. It was bad when billionaires hired people to drive cars with giant screens around Harvard Square displaying the names and faces of 19-year old undergrads. This is at a different level.
@Vladimir: I wasn’t willfully misrepresenting anything. Like I said, I’m not a lawyer. I noticed that the code, when talking about green card holders, specifically mentioned “conditional” permanent residents. I don’t know whether that modifier is controlling, or whether it applies to Khalil (I’m now reading that someone said it probably does, and I have no reason to dispute that). It is also apparently against the law for citizens to “espouse or endorse” terrorist activities, so as I said, it’s not clear to me that citizens have rights to speech that are not shared by permanent residents. And, legal technicalities aside, the idea that a citizen could be arrested for chanting “river to the sea” et cetera is pretty terrifying to me even though I don’t share those views and even though I’m appalled by the actions of ideologically-adjacent groups like Hamas.
Comment #100 March 10th, 2025 at 1:32 pm
Scott #98: it’s best not to argue on the basis of what someone “plausibly” would do. Trump/Musk would plausibly kill me if they could get away with it.
Comment #101 March 10th, 2025 at 1:37 pm
John #100: Very well then, what the organization he helps lead has explicitly advocated doing, and cheered when it was actually done (e.g., on October 7).
Comment #102 March 10th, 2025 at 1:46 pm
All I have to say is that it’s horrendous to hear Jewish and Israeli students were harassed at Columbia.
Comment #103 March 10th, 2025 at 1:47 pm
John #99
One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to understand the difference between citizens and aliens in this context. For citizens, being in the US is a right; for aliens, it’s a conditional privilege. The question of whether or not Khalil broke some of the conditions will be decided in court, but reasonable people should at least be able to acknowledge the existence of a plausible case against him under the terrorist activities clause (a clause that was passed into law over twenty years ago with broad bipartisan support, incidentally).
Comment #104 March 10th, 2025 at 1:55 pm
Mexican drug cartels have now been designated as terrorist organizations by Trump.
So buying a drug laced with fentanyl could now be interpreted as supporting and being affiliated with terrorists?
Comment #105 March 10th, 2025 at 2:01 pm
Vladimir #103: Jesus, man. I’m just pointing out that “permanent resident” and “conditional permanent resident” appear to be two different legal designations. What I remember about the Patriot Act is that it was decried by most institutions committed to civil liberties in this country, and for good reason. Possibly even a young Scott Aaronson thought it was a bad idea, I don’t know. There might be some “plausible” case against Khalil under this administration’s interpretation of the terrorist activities clause, but if so then it’s an indictment of either the interpretation or the clause. In any event, until that case is made, given not just what is plausible but what we actually know of this administration and what it really desires, the most righteous response is to push back, in my view.
Comment #106 March 10th, 2025 at 2:02 pm
Matthijs #102
Lots of people are indeed now finding out what it’s like being unfairly found guilty by association, like Tesla owners, American tourists in Canada/Europe and soon any part of the world… horrendous but not unexpected.
Comment #107 March 10th, 2025 at 2:42 pm
Scott #98,
except it seems they became way more radicalized after an entire year of Israel pounding on Gaza and killing tens of thousands.
I’m not excusing them (maybe that was already their believes on October 6th), but even my own views a week after October 7th and a year after October 7th became very different… aka “quantity has a quality of its own”.
Just like Israelis became way more radicalized after October 7th, and we heard calls for nuking Gaza whithin Bibi’s government.
It’s very hard to cool things down once it gets that bad and cause/effects become much harder to untangle in people’s minds.
Comment #108 March 10th, 2025 at 2:50 pm
> I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.
There’s always the integration option. People keep forgetting that one.
Comment #109 March 10th, 2025 at 3:10 pm
Vladimir#103
The terrorist activities clause discusses specific infractions (https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/ct/rls/fs/08/103399.htm), right? With respect to speech see also:
https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/ice-acknowledges-first-amendment-limits-on-its-power-to-remove-foreign-nationals-1
Comment #110 March 10th, 2025 at 3:32 pm
Vladimir #103
“One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to understand the difference between citizens and aliens in this context. For citizens, being in the US is a right”
see #90, in theory, citizenship can be revoked just as easily as permanent visa (at least when you got naturalized, like Musk… born citizens can only lose it through renunciation)
Comment #111 March 10th, 2025 at 4:30 pm
What’s unusual is that when a person on a valid student visa gets “deported” (it can happen if they applied for permanent visa and failed to complete the process within a year, even if it’s the immigration services’ fault), it’s done through a deportation letter, giving you a deadline to voluntarily leave the country.
Here we have someone on a stronger permanent visa, who got “arrested” and “detained” (behind bars) without due process, ie treated as if they broke the law but actually not being charged officially for breaking clear law. Ie what is typically done to illegal aliens (being here without a legal visa is the breaking of the law in that situation).
Comment #112 March 10th, 2025 at 4:55 pm
#fred 104: I’m not sure about the practical implications of this particular decision (let alone if it a good or bad one, or even actually the original question), but by buying any of the usual illegal drugs, you *are* supporting the cartels in a clear, active capacity.
There’s no seller without a buyer. Mexican cartels became powerful and feared because they’ve been making a ton of money by selling drugs to millions of inhabitants of the US (“Americans” is ambiguous here) for decades, and because the American gun market was only too happy to find customers.
Comment #113 March 10th, 2025 at 5:49 pm
It seems like fred is breaking the rule not to relitigate the conflict, with #81 and #107
Not surprising. I remember being horrified by his earlier comment comparing Israel deciding how much to give for each hostage (and having to make the horrible choice to leave someone if Hamas’ demands are too great) to Hamas’s practice of using their own civilians as human shields. Honestly surprised you didn’t ban him from the blog for that one:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8356#comment-1989087
My response to everyone else in this thread except Scott and Vladimir: terrorism and wanting the West destroyed is uniquely bad. First they came for the terrorists, and yes, I am doing nothing because I agree completely.
Comment #114 March 10th, 2025 at 6:18 pm
If for no other reason, this is why we should all be opposed to the actions taken against Columbia. Quote pulled from the CHE article linked here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/trump-administration-says-its-pulling-400-million-of-federal-contracts-from-columbia-u
“Samuel R. Bagenstos, who served as general counsel for the HHS under the Biden administration, said there are typically due-process requirements — such as statements of findings, hearings, and appeals — in cases alleging violations of civil-rights law. (Columbia has been accused of running afoul of Title VI, which bars discrimination in education based on race, color, and national origin.)
“Congress set forth specific procedures for suspending or terminating funds based on allegations of discrimination,” Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, wrote via a LinkedIn message. “This purported ‘immediate cancellation’ complies with none of them.”
The administration’s decision comes without clear evidence of wrongdoing by Columbia under Title VI, said Jonathan S. Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education.
“They don’t have a ruling from a judge. They don’t have a finding by an administrative agency. They haven’t tried to reach a resolution. They simply started cherry-picking money that’s going to Columbia and saying, ‘We’re not going to pay that,’” Fansmith said. “That’s not how we do this in the United States.””
Comment #115 March 10th, 2025 at 6:33 pm
how many ammendments actually specify “citizens “: none
they all refer to “people”
Comment #116 March 10th, 2025 at 7:04 pm
Scott #98
“I’m fulfilling my duty to the Enlightenment, when I insist that Khalil get every single right that he’s entitled to under US law.”
I know it’s been super popular amongst certain intellectual circles in the US to be throwing around the term “Enlightenment” at every opportunity since certain events took place in the Middle East over a year ago, but:
1) Enlightenment doesn’t apply to religious wars.
2) US law comes from English Common Law, which originates in the Middle Ages. So that’s got nothing to do with Enlightenment.
3) Enlightenment started in Europe in 17th century, from wig wearing aristocrats – they eventually figured that probabilities (from card playing), logic, math, then science were an awesome hobby to keep the boredom away, given that they really had nothing better to do anyway (actual labor was done by the masses).
4) or maybe you’re thinking about the other Enlightenment, i.e. Buddhahood, from the Sanskrit word “samyaksaṃbodhi”, meaning “full, complete awakening”, i.e. the OG “being woke”.
Comment #117 March 10th, 2025 at 7:09 pm
AnonymousOcelot: if the West is destroyed it won’t be because of student protestors. It will be because of Trump and other far-right parties trampling civil liberties. Wake up.
Comment #118 March 10th, 2025 at 7:20 pm
Anonymous Ocelot (aka Adam Treat) #113
My bad, I indeed used the forbidden “G” word…
Amusingly, the definition of relitigation is:
“The act of pursuing a legal issue again after it has already been resolved in court.”
I must have missed the memo…
Comment #119 March 10th, 2025 at 7:30 pm
Michelle Goldberg is not a hard leftist. This is from her article in the Times. In short: it’s entirely about speech Trump doesn’t like.
“Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, hasn’t been charged with any crime. A dossier on him compiled by Canary Mission, a right-wing group that tracks anti-Zionist campus activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just demands for divestment from Israel. Last year Khalil was suspended from his graduate program for his role in the campus demonstrations, but the suspension was reversed soon after, apparently for lack of evidence, and he completed his degree. The Department of Homeland Security claimed he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” but that’s an impossibly vague, legally meaningless charge.”
Comment #120 March 10th, 2025 at 7:37 pm
Random mathematician #112
my point was just that the term “terrorists” is now being thrown around so much that it loses it’s original meaning.
Cartels are dangerous crime profiting organizations that challenge governments’ monopoly on violence, not organizations that use violence as a mean to reach some political/religious goal.
Comment #121 March 10th, 2025 at 8:08 pm
To reiterate a few things:
“Sloppy” Steve Bannon clarified a few weeks ago that the government firings of officials who stood in the way of Trump (e.g. FBI agents, judges, prosecutors, and anyone who helps them) was just the first step, that you “ain’t seen nothing yet”, that the next stage will be arrests.
in February:
“President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was exploring whether he can move forward with El Salvador’s offer to accept and jail violent American criminals in the “most severe cases” even as he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both say it raises clear legal issues.”
And today:
“Trump warns that arrest of Palestinian activist at Columbia will be ‘first of many’.”
It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, i.e. the actual weaponization of the justice system to achieve the overthrow of the Republic.
That case of the Columbia student with permanent residency is just them poking at the edges to see if they get any push back… they already announced a while back that stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship was an option.
Comment #122 March 10th, 2025 at 9:40 pm
The Columbia task force’s report that Scott cites should be viewed more critically. Michael Thaddeus identifies many problems with it in this piece:
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/09/15/the-columbia-task-force-on-antisemitisms-report-generates-more-heat-than-light/
(Thaddeus is the former chair of Columbia Math Dept, but he’s no instinctive Columbia booster — he’s perhaps best-known for exposing Columbia’s juking of stats that resulted in it being excluded from the US News rankings).
Scott in particular mentions “students […] having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night.” I suspect this is based on the line from the report:
“Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls.”
One might reasonably assume from context, as Scott seems to, that these events occurred on Columbia’s campus. But at least the “pinning against wall” is known to have occurred OFF campus. This is of course still bad, but Columbia can’t be responsible for policing all of NYC.
My own view, having followed the events from afar: it was and maybe still is uncomfortable to be a vocal Zionist at Columbia University. But we need to distinguish “uncomfortable” from “unsafe”, and “Zionist” from “Jew” and from “Israeli”.
Comment #123 March 10th, 2025 at 11:34 pm
Extremely disappointing to hear that Columbia’s admins can simply decide to stop enforcing their own rules, and get away with it, when Jewish and Israeli students are targeted.
The university is still mostly controlled by those same admins, and the only thing the Trump/Musk administration can do is cut some federal research funding. I doubt anything will change at that university.
“the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.”
Scott, did you talk to any of the STEM professors you know at Columbia regarding leaving that university for a less antisemitic one? As Ryan Landay #62 wrote, Columbia is “basically running a terrorist training camp on the side”. Surely it would be better to move than to be complicit by allowing one’s research to enhance the reputation of such a place?
Comment #124 March 11th, 2025 at 12:05 am
I am confused. Is the potential loss of a few hundred million in grants for Columbia really comparable to the continuation of the horrifying antisemitism situation? Withholding grants is a blunt instrument, but I expect it to be at least somewhat effective. Why wouldn’t this be worth it?
Comment #125 March 11th, 2025 at 12:12 am
Scott, You are making a lot of assertions about what Khalil stands for based on what CUAD stands for. I don’t know if you’re aware that when, in October 2024, CUAD took a turn politically, including apologizing for its previous condemnation of Khymani James’ statements, a large group of Palestinian activists at Columbia broke off from CUAD to form a new organization, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/10/30/student-organizers-disaffiliate-from-cuad-establish-columbia-palestine-solidarity-coalition/
I don’t know what Khalil actually stood for or which of these organizations, if either, he affiliated with at that time — do you? Moreover, I’m at Columbia, on a different campus so didn’t see much of the protests, but I’ve heard several people in the last few days testify what a kind and decent person Mahmoud is, what a calming presence, how how he was a negotiator with the administration because he was a mediator. So I would be extremely careful of tarring him with guilt by association without knowing who he is or what he stands for.
To me, this case is very clear. The Trump administration does not even call him a Hamas supporter (which they could easily have said without it being true), they only say he took positions that ‘aligned with Hamas’, which I believe just means opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. [Note: opposing Israel’s war in Gaza does not even imply opposing an Israeli war against Hamas — I have no problem with the latter, but deeply oppose the former, because I see it as a war on the Gazan people and all the institutions of civilian life in Gaza. I’m not trying to debate that but just to point out that there is no implication for beliefs about Hamas or Oct 7 in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza.) They do not accuse him of any of the support for terrorism or membership in a terrorist organization that people are pointing out could provide a legal basis for deporting someone with a green card. So what this is seems very obvious and simple: the attempted deportation of a permanent resident for political speech that the administration does not like. And that, in turn, is the end of the first amendment and the first step of a tyranny that can outlaw its political opposition. This should not be hard, Scott. Don’t let your feelings about CUAD cloud your judgement here. This is something that anyone who values democracy should wholeheartedly and full-throatedly oppose.
Comment #126 March 11th, 2025 at 12:35 am
I imagine Columbia has enough in endowments to keep the important depts going for 4 years atleast. Am I wrong?
Money given to universities is rarely unrestricted and can only be spent in accordance with the bequest. If i give $100 million for scholarships that can only be spent on scholarships, even if the university doesn’t feel like it needs to give out more scholarships but would prefer the money be used for maintenance on deteriorating buildings or equipping labs. For most universities around 85% of the endowment is tied up for specific expenses. Hint: donors love giving money for scholarships, not so much for building maintenance.
Comment #127 March 11th, 2025 at 12:39 am
I really find discussions of national and international politics here on Scott’s blog as overly complicated and never focused on the unspoken obvious. In any case I am delighted at how supportive Scott is about Trump policy in this arena where Scott is particularly engaged in and knowledgeable about – antisemitism in Universities and Hamas and beyond.
However, there are obvious facts that would clarify these discussions and put them in a clearer context, but seem to never be mentioned. For example, extremely well informed and extremely accomplished and brilliant top thinkers like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk and Alan Dershowitz have expressed a great deal of respect and admiration for Trump’s contributions. The first two even have publicly stated how great a President Trump has been and continues to be, way beyond other Presidents going back decades or more. Certainly Scott and others here are greatly impressed by these three thinkers and doers.
It’s all fairly simple. Just Trump’s closing the border, stopping the horrifically dangerous nightmare of uncontrolled illegal immigration in a matter of days, alone puts him near the top of all US Presidents. His foreign policy with regard to Iran and Israel is also enough to put him far beyond recent Presidents.
Let us not forget that he won two Presidential elections without any previous experience in politics. He has spectacular cognitive abilities and instincts and we should never forget that. No one has come close to having such a record.
Trump has assembled a spectacular Cabinet and DOGE has uncovered massive fraud and waste with a totally open record of findings. This is yet another major advance putting him again near the top of US Presidents.
I am fully prepared to argue these points in detail either here or elsewhere. I believe in the power of critical reasoning with substantial intellects.
Comment #128 March 11th, 2025 at 1:39 am
The NY Times, news article tonight on Khalil:
“Mr. Khalil’s friends said they were stunned to hear of his arrest, describing him as kind, expressive and gentle. He is someone who loves to dance, to read Arab poetry and to play Arab music, said Maryam Alwan, a friend and student who is a pro-Palestinian organizer on campus. He hosted dinners at his home, with Middle Eastern fare served.
“One of my friends last year was graduating and wasn’t able to get a graduation robe,” Ms. Alwan said. “He just gave her his.”
…
Mr. Khalil’s arrest drew outrage from students and faculty at the university. Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, described him as brave, yet mild-mannered — a “consummate diplomat” who worked to find middle ground between protesters and school administrators.
Mr. Howley, who has known Mr. Khalil for about a year, having met him after Mr. Khalil began speaking out in campus protests, said he was frustrated by depictions of Mr. Khalil as a dangerous person.
“This is someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue,” he said. “This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things. So it’s really disturbing to see that kind of misrepresentation of him.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-ice-louisiana.html
Comment #129 March 11th, 2025 at 3:09 am
The expelled person arrived from Beirut. It was a multi-religious town like New York, until when Muslims terrorised others and imposed their rule. One of the people who escaped is writing a book about a disease called “suicidal empathy”. The Enlightenment is better defended by Trump, because he is naturally immune.
Here is a pool about «the % of Muslims who favour making sharia the official law of the country»:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview.
Comment #130 March 11th, 2025 at 4:43 am
Anonymous Ocelot #113
Be careful that once the genie is out of the bottle is always difficult to put it back in.
As much as I am convinced that the west should fight all expressions of religious terrorism and extremism, we should do always stride to do so without abdicating to the core human rights and liberal democracy values. It is a narrow path, but the only way to preserve who we are.
Comment #131 March 11th, 2025 at 5:07 am
Scott #53
“Mahmoud Khalil was not some random green card holder, but one of the leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which is pretty extreme even by the standards of anti-Israel groups and openly advocates for the killing of Israelis.”
I have been scouring the internet to find evidence of Khalil advocating for “killing” of Israelis. I have not found any yet. Can you point to an actual verifiable source?
If he did, then it would be easy to charge him of a crime, which has not happened yet, afaik.
Comment #132 March 11th, 2025 at 6:58 am
Fred #118, nope that ain’t me though I guess that means I’m perceived as your enemy?
Comment #133 March 11th, 2025 at 7:12 am
Scott wrote: “and then try to imagine we were talking about Black, Asian, or LGBTQ students. How would expect a university to respond, and how would you want it to?”
Writing to you from SE Asia, where all these developments are being closely watched. I don’t have to imagine what would happen if people in US universities openly discriminated against Asians. Because that has been happening for a very long time. It’s called “Affirmative Action”. Data point: it’s routine for biracial people here to be advised, when applying to US universities, to avoid using Asian, particularly Chinese names, and to use only the names associated with the non-Asian parent. (Cue: some Woit-like response: It’s lies, all lies!)
So you see that something not entirely unlike the scenario you envisage has already happened, inflicted not by students but by the universities themselves. How much protest did it generate from the professoriate? OK, so Asians weren’t spat on. But many of them were denied an education at a top American university, on crudely racist grounds, and that can have serious consequences indeed for their careers back home.
My point: the way Jewish students were/are being treated at Columbia (yes, my blood boiled too at reading the incredible pages 13-37 of the report) is not entirely without precedent, and that precedent shows that you cannot rely on the university to reform itself. Somebody from outside had to shake things up, and unfortunately that somebody is Trump (and not the courts, as should have happened).
Comment #134 March 11th, 2025 at 7:16 am
“I have been scouring the internet to find evidence of Khalil advocating for “killing” of Israelis. I have not found any yet. Can you point to an actual verifiable source?
If he did, then it would be easy to charge him of a crime, which has not happened yet, afaik.”
I think this is the main point. I am here at Columbia. Maybe there is evidence against Khalil, but I don’t know of any. He is a member of various groups. Some of those groups have stated things and posted things that are supportive of Hamas. They also support other things not directly tied to terrorism. As far as I know Khalil has been careful not to pass out flyers, post things, or make statements himself directly in support of terrorism. He also has not been tied to or arrested for vandalism. He was inside of Milstein (Barnard) with the students who occupied it for a couple of hours but that’s basically it afaik. He appears to have been careful enough as someone in a precarious position who is in the political crosshairs. If he were a citizen of the US this would be easily protected by the first amendment. I mean Trump has people in his own administration who are posting Nazi crap (google Kingsley Wilson) and just pardoned J6 “political prisoners” because, you know, free speech. Should it be up to every new administration to aggressively target those that we know are clear not real threats (even though we might abhor their speech)?
Comment #135 March 11th, 2025 at 7:54 am
Scott, I appreciate your perspective and hope for the sake of the country that the Democratic party will do a better job of listening to voices like yours.
I would add that to understand politicians, the best place to look is at their constituencies. Most voters are not analyzing Elon Musk’s attitude toward Jews. Instead, they see in Columbia an institution that thinks of itself as a sort of sovereign territory exempt from the standard rules of society, such as the expectation that the cops will show up when you break into a building. They see privileged students and faculty instead demanding “negotiations” under the pretense that Columbia University’s administration or endowment plays any significant role in the Israel/Palestine conflict whatsoever (why don’t they demand divestment for their college funds or retirement accounts?), and justifiably conclude that the actual purpose is to advance the protestors’ own power and influence through fear and intimidation. And they ask, why am I paying for this?
Academics like us can certainly argue that this perception reflects only a small part of Columbia, or any university. But imagine you are touring a hospital at which you plan to undergo major surgery. You see four operating rooms with the latest high-tech robotic laser surgery, and one using leeches to prepare the patient for a lobotomy. What perception do you take away?
Comment #136 March 11th, 2025 at 7:56 am
What Aram says in #41 and #42 is exactly the right take: the story here is the violation of due process by an aspiring fascist state. Whatever you think about Columbia or Khalil, this is one of those stories which ends with “and then they came for me” unless we keep our heads on straight now.
Comment #137 March 11th, 2025 at 8:09 am
I don’t see the need to split hair about Trump’s actual goal, here.
His first term started with the Muslim ban.
He’d be happy if all US Muslims were kicked out, and the campus protests are the perfect excuse to get started, just showing any sort of support for the Palestinians is enough. And since it’s all happening in Universities, he gets to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. defund the liberal elite.
Why the obsession with Muslims? Hard to know for sure, but Trump has had tremendous financial support from the evangelical wing in the US and very powerful Israel-First characters, like Miriam Adelson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Adelson
“After 2016, she was known for her support for Donald Trump. She and her husband were the largest donors of Trump throughout his presidency; they provided the largest donation to his 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference and the 2020 campaign.
She has written that Trump “should enjoy sweeping support” among U.S. Jews and Israelis, and that Trump deserves a “Book of Trump” in the Bible due to his support for Israel. She pushed for the pardon of Aviem Sella who spied against America. Adelson wrote that Trump represents “kinship, friendship, courage, the triumph of truth” and that “Israelis and proud Jews owe Donald Trump our gratitude.”
Trump met with Adelson in February 2024, and she supported Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election. In May 2024, Politico reported that Adelson will contribute $90 million to a Super PAC supporting Trump.
Miriam Adelson sought support from candidate Trump for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, pledging more than $100 million to Trump’s campaign in exchange for U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the region”
Comment #138 March 11th, 2025 at 8:27 am
@bringEmAllHere #122: thanks for posting that article by Thaddeus. It accords with the impression I had when reading the task force memo, and supports Peter Woit’s comments that there’ve been a lot of lies regarding the force of anti-semitism on campus and the inadequacies of Columbia’s response to it.
“It would be worthwhile for Columbia to have a report that carefully analyzed and assessed the alleged episodes of antisemitism on campus in the past year. But this is not such a report. The task force’s choice to publicize—unfiltered—the claims made in the listening sessions is more likely to inflame than to inform.
By creating and propagating in the media the false perception that Columbia is a cesspool of antisemitism and a place of physical danger for Jewish students, the task force does a disservice to these students. I would be the first to agree that hard truths about Columbia need to be acknowledged candidly, even at a cost to our reputation. Yet the task force, by relying on vague and uncorroborated allegations, misleading accounts of the facts, and misrepresentations of political speech as antisemitic, is needlessly sowing fear.
There is no university in America which owes more to its Jewish students and faculty than Columbia. Of course, there is antisemitism here, as there is everywhere. But the vast majority of us at Columbia—even including the many critics of the Israeli state—treat students of all creeds and nationalities with fairness, decency, and respect. That is the truth of the matter, which the events of the past year have done nothing to alter.”
Comment #139 March 11th, 2025 at 9:30 am
John #138: I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that “the vast majority of us at Columbia … treat students of all creeds and nationalities with fairness, decency, and respect.” I certainly don’t! The trouble is, that’s a low and irrelevant bar.
Even at the height of the Holocaust, fanatical antisemites didn’t have anywhere close to a majority in occupied Europe. But they didn’t need a majority on their side—merely a majority to not know or care or be willing to take risks to stop them. Which is exactly what they got, in pretty much every occupied country except Denmark.
Obviously Columbia has never been within a thousand miles of that. But there too, it takes only a minority of fanatical, rule-breaking, and sometimes violent anti-Zionists, and a majority unwilling or unable to stop that minority, for me to stop recommending Jews or Israelis to go to Columbia. Do you blame me?
Comment #140 March 11th, 2025 at 9:44 am
Harvey Friedman #127: Your comment reads like a parody of MAGA talking points, like something that would fit better at Breitbart or RealClearPolitics than in this comment section. I find this sad coming from one of the greatest logicians of our time.
For me, maintaining my intellectual honesty means:
(1) being willing to say when the MAGA forces do something I partly agree with (or agree with in goals but not execution), but also
(2) recognizing that it doesn’t come from Enlightenment liberalism or any other value system I could possibly respect. Again, any more than the T-Rex in Jurassic Park ate the velociraptors out of a deep desire to protect the human children.
Comment #141 March 11th, 2025 at 9:45 am
Trump does not care about jews, although he cares deeply about pleasing Netanyahu and Israel. It is quite humorous that you all cannot see that Trump not only wants to destroy Universities, Academia and Education; but that it is a step in his wider plan of destroying freedom of opposition to federal interests. As academics, it is shameful that you do not see the opposition as a chance for genuine discussion and progress (as academia has been for all of human history), but instead choose to blindly follow the headlines and declare the opposition as ‘terrorists’ and ‘radicals’.
Comment #142 March 11th, 2025 at 9:52 am
John #138
quote:
“But the vast majority of us at Columbia—even including the many critics of the Israeli state—treat students of all creeds and nationalities with fairness, decency, and respect.”
This thread may give a skewed impression of the student demographics at Columbia.
Given that NYC has the biggest Jewish community outside of Israel, one could expect a significant number of Jewish students, and I would think that Muslims/Palestinians are vastly outnumbered.
And in reality Columbia probably is one of the most diverse campus in the nation.
E.g., 20 years ago, STEM graduate school at Columbia was at least 80% Chinese (*), the rest a smorgasbord of Europeans (lots of Greeks for some reason), and then small exotic groups, like Iranians, etc.
Obviously when such a diversity is brought together, you always have little factions pitched against one another (e.g. Greeks vs Turks), but it’s clear that antisemitism was never the common denominator that drove all those foreign students to join Columbia.
(*) don’t know what are the current numbers for Chinese students, but I expect that number must have fallen dramatically… and soon the number of foreign students coming to the US will fall dramatically, regardless of origin.
Comment #143 March 11th, 2025 at 9:55 am
Daniel Harlow #136,
“the story here is the violation of due process”
This is overstated. At least we do not know *yet* that any violation took place. The good news is that I was wrong and he hasn’t been deported yet. He is getting his day in court and so the case will be reviewed by the judiciary. For a good rundown about the current status of the case from a legal standpoint see this:
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/131-five-questions-about-the-khalil
Comment #144 March 11th, 2025 at 9:56 am
Ken #125 and #128, Dave #134: Thank you! These are exactly the kinds of arguments I’d want to be making if I were Khalil’s attorney, and exactly the kinds of arguments I’d want to hear on his behalf if I were the deportation judge.
Namely: “you have the wrong guy. This is not a terrorism supporter, as CUAD is (over-the-top explicitly since October 2024), but merely a peaceful negotiator on behalf of CUAD—doing his best to calm tensions, an Egypt or Qatar to CUAD’s Hamas.” If they can prove that case, then I’ll oppose Khalil’s deportation as much as you do.
By contrast, all it would take from the other side would be to unearth direct quotes from Khalil himself where he supports CUAD’s post-October-2024 mission, of cheering violence against Jewish and Israeli civilians all over the world toward the goal of liberating Palestine “By Any Means Necessary.” I agree that they haven’t done that yet, and the fact that they haven’t troubles me.
Comment #145 March 11th, 2025 at 9:57 am
Scott #139: you picked out the least important paragraph of that quotation. What about the others, and the rest of Thaddeus’ article? The point is that it is simply not clear that Columbia, while not acting perfectly, has done anything which approaches the bar required for the withholding of federal funds. I would go farther to say that it seems extremely unlikely at this point that they have violated Title VI. And if the government believes otherwise, they should make that case in earnest (I know you agree with this sentence).
I don’t blame you for recommending that Jews and Israeli’s don’t go to Columbia if you suspect that things are not well there and if those people have other options. Better safe than sorry at that level. But if we’re talking about the best *public* stance in the face of a Trump administration filled with evil morons who want to destroy universities, science, civil liberties, etc. much more broadly, and who are willing to defy the normal legal strictures, then I think it’s important to be clear about what is the most serious and present danger. And I’d say that when unsure about what is true (e.g. regarding the lawfulness of Khalil’s arrest), the default position at this point should be that the administration is full of shit, which you are willing to revise of course given evidence to the contrary. Yours is an important voice, and one that I admire a lot (particularly outside of Palestine/Israel issues).
Comment #146 March 11th, 2025 at 10:05 am
Scott #139
“for me to stop recommending Jews or Israelis to go to Columbia. Do you blame me?”
But right now we’re talking about the unlawful rounding up/arrest/deportation/permanent visa revocation of a Palestinian student, and, according to POTUS, “THE FIRST OF MANY TO COME”.
And your conclusion is that, somehow, the only students who should be nervous about this (and avoid Columbia or any other US campus) aren’t Muslim/Palestinian students but Jewish and Israeli students, even though the government of the United States of America (the most powerful country in the world) is doing all this illegal stuff in their name?
It seems to me it’s bad for everyone.
Comment #147 March 11th, 2025 at 10:34 am
To clarify, I’m not saying that Khalil isn’t a blood thirsty terrorist or part of the political/propaganda wing of Hamas, I have no idea.
I’m only saying that, if he were, there would probably have been clear charges against him already (maybe we’ll see that soon hopefully?), like it’s the case when the FBI arrests someone on terrorism charges after they entrap them, find evidence, etc.
The fact that POTUS says “THE FIRST OF MANY TO COME” makes it sounds like Columbia is harboring a vast pro-Hamas network.
At a minimum, I hope that soon the US government will clarify what sort of voicing of SUPPORT FOR THE PLIGHT OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE is still acceptable in the US, vs what would cross the line of free speech and viewed as unconstitutional antisemitism and get you automatically arrested/disappeared/deported.
Comment #148 March 11th, 2025 at 10:39 am
John #145: If you’re telling me both that
(1) it’s reasonable for me to advise Jewish students to avoid Columbia because of antisemitism,
but also
(2) the federal government has no business telling Columbia to do anything about it,
then what exactly is the federal civil rights regime for? At that point, it seems like we should just junk it.
Comment #149 March 11th, 2025 at 10:45 am
Scott #140
“Harvey Friedman #127: Your comment reads like a parody of MAGA talking points, like something that would fit better at Breitbart or RealClearPolitics than in this comment section. I find this sad coming from one of the greatest logicians of our time.”
Lol.
Me: “pretend you’re a Trump voter and say something nice about him and is policies”
ChatGPT said:
“As a Trump voter, I’d say that I really appreciate his focus on bringing jobs back to America and supporting the economy. His policies, like cutting taxes and deregulating businesses, helped to create a strong economy and lower unemployment. I also like his “America First” approach to foreign policy, where he prioritized the interests of the American people and stood up to unfair trade deals. He’s not afraid to speak his mind and challenge the status quo, which is something I admire.”
Comment #150 March 11th, 2025 at 10:47 am
Ken #125 and #128:
You’d be shocked to discover that many Nazis were loving husbands and doting fathers, certainly according to their Nazi friends.
Comment #151 March 11th, 2025 at 10:49 am
Scott #148: OK, I’m not sure “reasonable” is the right word then. I’m just trying to say that I don’t blame you, given your personal anxieties about the situation and — most importantly — given that fact that whether or not these people you advise end up going to Columbia isn’t important in the scheme of things.
Comment #152 March 11th, 2025 at 10:53 am
Two comments:
(a) “I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.” I tend to disagree. If possible (there are exceptions), such arguments should happen as much as possible on a local level (outside pressure is ok). Otherwise, we have a radicalization in the shadows, like with abortion during Roe vs Wade.
(b) ” … President Armstrong issued an excellent statement … with no hint of denial or defensiveness.” I’m divided here. Shouldn’t she say that this is a terrible precedent, independent of the Israel-Palestine issue? That this is an attack on universities? If she does not push back, who will? I understand that she wants the best for Columbia, but still …
Comment #153 March 11th, 2025 at 10:57 am
Scott #148: I’ll also say that there’s a lot of daylight between thinking that there are more comfortable places for Jewish students to be at the moment and thinking that the university has violated federal law in a way that warrants this kind of government intrusion.
Comment #154 March 11th, 2025 at 11:05 am
ChatGPT:
As Scott Aaronson, I would say that while the pro-Palestinian student protests on U.S. campuses may seem far removed from quantum computing, there is an important connection between fostering an environment of critical engagement and the development of fields like quantum computing.
At its core, quantum computing is about thinking differently, questioning assumptions, and tackling deep, complex problems—much like the activism surrounding issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The protests reflect a kind of intellectual engagement and passion for justice, which are vital qualities for scientific advancement. In quantum computing, we rely on fresh, creative perspectives to solve problems that challenge our understanding of the universe. Similarly, activism and protest often require us to challenge the status quo and think critically about longstanding issues.
That said, it’s essential to tread carefully. While it’s important for students to engage in political activism, we must ensure that the focus remains on productive, nuanced discussion. Criticizing the policies of the Israeli government is one thing; unfortunately, in some instances, political discourse can spill over into harmful rhetoric that targets Jewish people as a group. This is where the risk of antisemitism arises. As a Jewish person myself, I am acutely aware of the importance of maintaining a discourse that condemns hate in all its forms, without resorting to harmful stereotypes or collective blame.
In an ideal world, we can support Palestinian rights and justice while also being vigilant against any expression of prejudice or bigotry, whether against Jews or any other group. The same principles apply in quantum computing: the more inclusive and diverse the environment, the better the ideas that emerge. Diversity of thought—whether in political activism or scientific innovation—leads to breakthroughs, but only if it’s grounded in respect, empathy, and the commitment to creating safe spaces for everyone.
So, while the protests themselves are an expression of passionate political engagement, we must ensure that they do not devolve into divisive or discriminatory behavior. By promoting justice, empathy, and dialogue, we can foster an environment that encourages both social progress and the kinds of intellectual rigor that lead to breakthroughs in fields like quantum computing.
Comment #155 March 11th, 2025 at 11:37 am
John #151, #153: Thanks, I’m genuinely grateful for your honesty! Rather than denying the reality of an antisemitism problem at Columbia, you simply say we should treat it like the proverbial missing stair, warning each other to step around it. My only further comment is that this is the exact opposite of what progressives advocate in pretty much every analogous situation, and that you can’t expect people not to notice that.
Comment #156 March 11th, 2025 at 11:40 am
Scott #155: that’s not at all what I’m saying, but good job with the uncharitable reading.
Comment #157 March 11th, 2025 at 11:43 am
Scott #144: “Namely: “you have the wrong guy. This is not a terrorism supporter, as CUAD is (over-the-top explicitly since October 2024), but merely a peaceful negotiator on behalf of CUAD—doing his best to calm tensions, an Egypt or Qatar to CUAD’s Hamas.” If they can prove that case, then I’ll oppose Khalil’s deportation as much as you do.”
No one has to prove this case to oppose his deportation. Our entire system of justice and the freedoms we rely on require the government to prove that he *did* actively support terrorism if he is to be deported. If that case is proven, then I would not oppose Khalil’s deportation. Your fear, legitimate as it may be, is no excuse to even entertain letting these rights slipping even one hair. If we let them, we may all have to be proving our innocence before the federal government someday too.
Comment #158 March 11th, 2025 at 11:47 am
@cds #157: amen.
Comment #159 March 11th, 2025 at 11:55 am
cds #157: Firstly, this isn’t a criminal trial; it’s a deportation proceedings. Even there, though, I would like the government to face the burden of proving that Khalil supported terrorism, or otherwise violated what he explicitly agreed when he received a student visa and then a green card. I was talking about what would sway me personally.
Comment #160 March 11th, 2025 at 12:08 pm
John #156: In that case, maybe you’d care to differentiate your view from my “missing stair” understanding of it. Are you saying that, yes, Columbia should fix the missing stair, but the government shouldn’t try to force it to fix the stair, for example by threatening to withhold funds? Should the government do anything? If so, what?
Or is the point, frankly, that this would’ve been fine if the Biden administration had done it, but it still needs to be fought when the Trump administration does it, because the latter has earned zero benefit of the doubt regarding its motives and intentions (“first they came for X, then they came for Y, etc”)? I’d actually be fairly sympathetic to that position.
Comment #161 March 11th, 2025 at 12:22 pm
Maybe we’re all confused and Khalil wasn’t arrested at all, but “recruited” by the US Government to help with the direct talks the Trump administration is currently conducting with the actual Hamas terrorists…
Comment #162 March 11th, 2025 at 12:30 pm
The T-Rex is already having tea-time with the velociraptors:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/meet-adam-boehler-trumps-complacent-confused-and-dangerously-naive-hostage-envoy/
Comment #163 March 11th, 2025 at 12:47 pm
McInnes #133 — Exactly. One grandson is half Jewish, half Chinese. If he turns out to be heterosexual (he’s only 8) he’s in the ‘do not admit’ trifecta.
Comment #164 March 11th, 2025 at 12:52 pm
The latest updates on the case: a Judge blocking the deportation, the Trump post on this, and the White House posting “SHALOM, MAMOUD”…
Comment #165 March 11th, 2025 at 1:38 pm
Several further bits of Columbia history if you’re interested.
My late father-in-law graduated from Columbia in 1928 or 1929. He wanted to be an engineer, but was told by a dean that he couldn’t major in it, either because Jewish engineers wouldn’t be hired or Jews shouldn’t be engineers. Unfortunately, we don’t remember exactly what he told us. In any event he majored in business going down to Wall Street in the summer of ’29 and quickly had to seek other employment. He eventually wound up as the chief financial analyst of the SEC.
He was very impressed with my uncle who went to CCNY, saying that’s where the smart guys went, the dummies going to Columbia (honest to God).
Comment #166 March 11th, 2025 at 2:52 pm
Adam Treat #143, I’m not an expert but my understanding is that in the larger case of pulling the grants based on a title VI violation they did not follow any of the standard proceedings for investigating or punishing such a violation. This seems like a clear violation of due process? With regard to Khalil, I understand the rules are different for citizens and non-citizens, but so far I have not seen any attempt by the government to provide a legal basis for detention without a warrant. They simply sent some goons to grab him and spirit him away. Where is the personal determination from the secretary of state that this is necessary? Why the clear implication from Trump that this will now be standard process as a means of intimidation of speech that they don’t like? Of course they are going to go after the easiest targets first, but we all need to see the writing on the wall.
Comment #167 March 11th, 2025 at 2:57 pm
It appears that deporting Khalil is not clearly unlawful. If this goes to the Supreme Court, I don’t fancy his chances.
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/131-five-questions-about-the-khalil
Comment #168 March 11th, 2025 at 3:42 pm
RB #167
from your link
“Instead, the second question is what the government’s legal basis was for Kahlil’s arrest. As relevant here, ICE officers can make warrantless arrests only when they have “reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any [relevant immigration] law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.” The “reason to believe” standard has generally been viewed as equivalent to probable cause. Thus, to sustain the lawfulness of Khalil’s arrest, the government has to identify the specific basis on which it believes that Khalil is subject to removal.”
But, as I was saying previously:
sure, ICE can arrest “aliens” when they have reasons to think they’re illegal, before a warrant, because ILLEGAL ALIENS are by definition breaking the immigration laws, just by standing and breathing inside the USA.
I.e. an ICE officer can walk up to someone who looks like an illegal, ask for residency papers/visa/… and arrest the guy if none is provided, because then the assumption is that the guy is here illegally, and proving this is easy and doesn’t require an actual investigation with complex evidence, etc.
But if a PERMANENT RESIDENT (or even a Naturalized citizen for that matter) is asked by ICE to show proof of being here legally, and he complies, the idea that it’s ok for ICE to arrest the guy without a proper warrant (stating why he has abused his rights) is preposterous, since he has shown proof of residency.
Again, if this is okay, it means that ICE can just as well arrest ANY NATURALIZED CITIZEN WITHOUT ANY WARRANT because it may be the case that they’ve broken the oath they took or mislead homeland security during their naturalization process (e.g. by being a communist or being affiliated with terrorists, etc).
It’s just basic law in the US that residents and citizens ought to be told why they’re being arrested, and what laws have been broken, at least within a reasonable time window.
Comment #169 March 11th, 2025 at 4:02 pm
The larger issue is clearly one of immigration.
This administration tries to deny that this country was based on immigration.
The rounding up of illegals, breaking of families, etc. That’s the low hanging fruit, since it’s legal.
Then the case of Mr Khalil will create an important precedent for all permanent residents, i.e. it’s okay to arrest them as if they’re illegals, without due process.
There’s clearly the will to weaken/cancel the status of permanent residency.
We also heard from this administration that naturalized citizens aren’t really like all the other US born citizens either. And Trump started floating the idea of revoking naturalization.
What’s next? US born citizens:
On his first day, Trump signed an executive order to cancel birthright citizenship, he knows it’s unconstitutional but doesn’t give a shit.
If he could, he would retroactively strip US born citizens of their citizenship too, based on whatever criteria he likes.
Then of course there is Trump’s 5M$ gold visas…
Comment #170 March 11th, 2025 at 4:36 pm
fred #168,
It appears that there is a foreign policy loophole via which there could be legal standing. That is how I understood it.
Comment #171 March 11th, 2025 at 4:54 pm
Scott #160: Let me see if I can defend the point John is making here. Taking the Thaddeus and Woit pieces at face-value, it seems clear that the following are true:
1. There are antisemites at Columbia.
2. Some (most?) of these have been emboldened in the last year and a half.
4. Antisemitic targeting of Jews at Columbia exists but it has been overstated
Certainly, Columbia has a duty under Title VI to protect its Jewish students against targeting on this basis. However, taking the Thaddeus article at face value it is not at all clear that Columbia does not currently fulfill this obligation especially when presented with evidence (whether or not it did in the past). Until this is established, they should not have their federal funds withheld.
Given that essentially the only lever Columbia has without disrupting speech is to punish those who do this after the fact and that they have had to do this, the fact that they fulfill their legal duty does not necessarily mean that Columbia is the safest university for Jews or, perhaps more relevantly, that Jews feel safe at Columbia. This is very regrettable: every college student should feel safe at their university. If someone you are advising would feel unsafe at Columbia then certainly you should advise them not to go there. Certainly I would not advise someone who did not feel safe in Hyde Park to come to UChicago even if I personally do feel safe on campus.
With that said, I think it is important to point out that the exaggeration of these incidents contributes to this perception that it is not safe. To use one of Thaddeus’ examples https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/06/20/da-to-drop-hate-crime-charges-against-former-student-accused-of-assaulting-israeli-student-with-stick/
One of the early highly publicized hate crimes was dropped as the Manhattan DA determined that there was unsufficient evidence to show that the blow was struck on purpose (and, from my understanding, the victim of the case physically initiated the altercation).
I think this is very understandable. When you are a nail, everything looks like a hammer. Jews have seen a lot of discrimination in the past (even previously at Columbia as lusyii #165 points out). It is certainly also true that messaging which calls for violence against Israel (and with it anti-semitic dog whistles) have become more accepted within the hard left in the last year and a half. To be extremely clear, I think this is horrible and I have no respect for those who glorify October 7th.
However, this does not give a carte blanche to take any steps to remedy this. It is clear to me that some groups have used this as a pretense to chill speech bringing attention to the direness of the situation in Gaza by branding it as antisemitic (Thaddeus provides a particular example within the report by the antisemitism taskforce).
Comment #172 March 11th, 2025 at 5:32 pm
Thinking it over, what strikes me is that the conventional wisdom on these questions consists of three hard-to-reconcile elements:
(1) Free speech is good and should be protected, certainly in academia.
(2) Calls for genocide, and other incitements to violence, should not be protected academic speech.
(3) Having said that, when it comes to calls for genocide of the Jews (“globalize the intifada,” “Khaybar ya Yahud,” etc.), such a large fraction of humanity agrees with those calls that it’s simply impractical to treat them as prohibited incitement, or else (for example) elite universities would need to expel a significant percentage of their students. Thus, we need to treat these and only these as protected free speech.
This is precisely the trap that the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn walked into in the infamous hearing of December 2023. And we’re now seeing it rear its head a second time.
I don’t claim the answer here is obvious—I also don’t want to live in universities that have turned into police panopticons!—but acknowledging the reality that (1)-(3) were always going to be hard to reconcile seems like a good first step.
Comment #173 March 11th, 2025 at 6:18 pm
Scott#172
This has always been the issue and an issue with how Columbia and most other universities and colleges have handled these protests. What was needed from the start was the following:
1.Proper and specific time place and manner rules for protesting. To me this would mean-protesters must register and be approved for their protests, no masks without a medical exemption, and specific time and place for protests if approved. This means never inside a building, and a specification of location and time so as not to disturb sleeping (we have dorms right on campus) and classes.
2.Specific and clearly stated guidelines for punishment for any violations of the stated rules. These can be a first strike, second strike, third strike set of rules leading to expulsion or determined by stated severity of the infractions.
3.Finally, the hardest part-a statement about what speech is off limits even if (1) is followed. This is harder in the era of universities litigating every little act or statement as one that can do harm. If the issue is students feeling “safe” and “comfortable” then this becomes very limited of course.
The last point is definitely the hardest to define and deal with. Clearly many Jewish students here (and faculty) felt very uncomfortable with what was said at protests. This is understandable. I am Jewish and I am not one of those who felt in any way uncomfortable-but I am an old school free speech sort, and I don’t think my standard should set the rules. However these rules are set-they need to be applied uniformly and objectively. This means even speech no one on campus is unhappy with brings punishment if (1) is violated. A very important thing to note is that while (3) is the hardest aspect and would take the most thought, Columbia, in my mind, already failed with points 1 and 2.
Comment #174 March 11th, 2025 at 6:30 pm
Scott #172: I definitely don’t think that most or even a plurality of protestors at these campuses actually support the genocide of the Jews. I think to them these slogans support the destruction of the Israeli state (and efforts to pressure Western governments into ceasing their support for it). From those I have talked to, it seems that a majority opinion is that they wish to happen via a combined state for Palestinians and Israeli Jews rather than the mass slaughter or exile of Israelis (though this pipedream seems to me that it has not been well thought out).
It is certainly very insidious of a lot of the Pro-Palestinian groups to adopt such dog whistles as chants. It seems a very intentional motte-and-bailey by radical elements of the leadership to give plausable deniability about anti-semitism.
Comment #175 March 11th, 2025 at 6:40 pm
Scott #172
Elite universities in the U.S. reject many qualified applicants, especially international ones. Do you really think it would be difficult to fill the spots currently occupied by people calling for the genocide of the Jews?
(As I understand it selection criteria between very good students is not based on potential academic performance. This makes it different than the NBA or graduate school admissions in the hard sciences).
Comment #176 March 11th, 2025 at 6:48 pm
Not a lawyer… or anything smart, actually.
Traffic tickets are guilty until proven innocent; so, I knew there was something somewhere. Some readers may find the link,
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+untold+story+of+noncriminal+habeas+corpus+and+the+1996…-a020966066
interesting.
“… The acts threaten to entrust the deportation process from beginning to end to the executive branch without any opportunity for judicial review, …”
Comment #177 March 11th, 2025 at 6:54 pm
The link for noncriminal habeus corpus has an ellipsis that may interfere with cut and paste
<a href="https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+untold+story+of+noncriminal+habeas+corpus+and+the+1996…-a020966066
Comment #178 March 11th, 2025 at 7:01 pm
“With IIRAIRA, all noncitizens, regardless of legal status and including long-term legal permanent residents, became subject to removal and greatly expanded the offenses that could lead to formal deportation.[9]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and_Immigrant_Responsibility_Act_of_1996
Sorry for the repeated postings. This is the law mentioned in the problem link.
Comment #179 March 11th, 2025 at 7:24 pm
Scott #172 “I also don’t want to live in universities that have turned into police panopticons!”
From your blog post — Steven Weinberg (1933-2021): a personal view
“Steve also once told me that, when he (like other UT faculty) was required to write a statement about what he would do to advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, he submitted just a single sentence: “I will seek the best candidates, without regard to race or sex.” I remarked that he might be one of the only academics who could get away with that.’
Academe at your institution and elsewhere at that point had turned itself into an (internal intellectual) police panopticon all by itself and with no external political pressure.
Shades of James Sylvester being refused a degree from Cambridge although he came in second in the math Tripos in 1837 because he refused to state his acceptance of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, as he was Jewish.
Comment #180 March 11th, 2025 at 8:08 pm
Aperson #175 — After serving as an army doc for two years in ’68 – ’70, a time when we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam, I left with little respect for its leadership. I was stateside at Fitzsimons General Hospital, one of the Army’s premier hospitals, which was a plum assignment (because the army was very short of neurologists). This meant that 2 year docs who’d served their first year in Vietnam got their choice of assignment when returning stateside. So I saw plenty of them and NOT ONE thought we were winning over there, despite what the top brass said to the press and the president.
So who would have thought that 33 years later I’d be friendly with and respect a retired Major General, George Baker. Never say never. He was a very intelligent man, an orthopedic surgeon, who’d been chief at Walter Reed and found retirement boring, so he practiced at my hospital. He told me about something he called charm school. It was where officers newly promoted to General rank were sent for training. They were told to toe the straight and narrow sexually and in other matters, and that if a planeload of them went down, the army would have no trouble at all filling their shoes.
Why should future protestors hear about this? Because, according to the net, Columbia accepts under one in 25 applicants and Google accepts around one in five hundred (look it up). They are not so wonderful that they can’t be easily replaced with people of comparable quality.
Comment #181 March 11th, 2025 at 11:54 pm
Scott, antisemitism on campuses exists but I disagree with your premise (3), at least when it comes to college campuses. I do not believe that more than a minuscule proportion of students, faculty, etc. on US campuses are for genocide of the Jews. I’m an academic and have never encountered anyone who I suspect of having those beliefs. Here’s something I’m curious about: what do you make of the many Jewish students at places like Harvard and Columbia who have joined “pro-Palestinian” protests? Do you believe that a large fraction of them are actually anti-semites? What do you make of scholars of the Holocaust, with parents who died in the Holocaust, who say that what Israel has done in response to October 7 has been grossly immoral? Sorry if you’ve answered these questions in previous threads I’m not aware of, or if this qualifies as relitigating the conflict. If so, feel free to ignore.
Comment #182 March 12th, 2025 at 12:19 am
Ranter #1, first of all, I think that you confuse philosophy with basically every other of the humanities – and even then I would hesitate talking about philosophy in the US, since I don’t have the firsthand experience or enough knowledge of the field to state positively that both departments of philosophy and philosophy itself are completely useless. I can only speak for my country of origin (Russia), where both things, the way they exist today, are not just useless, but also actively harmful – for whatever happens to philosophers during their studies, it consistently turns them into know-it-all know-nothing blabbermouths who can’t stop talking about every subject under Sun while not having not only the hard knowledge relevant to that specific subject, the amount of hard knowledge being inversely proportional to the amount of philosophical regalia, but also the basic reasoning skills which most people still possess upon graduation from highschool. I strongly suspect that the process of “education” that consists of learning every stupid “theory” that was proposed by philosophers since the time of pre-Socratics while convincing oneself that all of this equally makes sense, affects negatively one’s ability to reason. But other humanities have both subjects and methods to study these subjects scientifically. The problem is not that they have discovered everything there’s to discover: we don’t have a general theory of literature, or even language. The problem is not focusing enough on, well, science, since these fields are so easily complicated. And there are other fields, like art, which are not science and shouldn’t be.
Comment #183 March 12th, 2025 at 12:34 am
I think, a more adequate description of the situation would be that they (Trump, Musk and their mignons) are literally Nazis, but they think that the Jews actually belong to the Übermenschen, and the college campus kids protesting for Palestine are racial traitors. If you look at what’s happening from this perspective, it makes much more sense.
Comment #184 March 12th, 2025 at 12:40 am
Scott #144: you’re assuming he’s been a CUAD negotiator throughout, but do we know if he had any affiliation at all with CUAD after the Oct 2024 schism? I don’t know, do you? Even if he was a mediator after Oct 2024, that wouldn’t make him CUAD’s negotiator. It seems to me you’ve tentatively convicted him of the worst Jew-hating Jew-killing sentiments expressed at any of the protests, and you need to have it proven otherwise before you’d oppose his detention. Whereas he has been detained for what thus far is simply claimed to be participating in the protests, which are declared to be “aligned with Hamas”, without a single other claim. On its face, then, this is arresting a permanent resident for expressing political sentiments that the administration does not like. I think the response of any believer in Democracy should be to utterly oppose this unless and until they present any more serious evidence, rather than to withhold judgement until they conclusively fail to produce such evidence. The action taken for the reasons declared is unconscionable and tyrannical.
Scott #172: AFAICT not one person in these comments has argued that calls for genocide against Jews should be protected speech (by the way, I wish people would place calls for genocide, murder, or torture of Palestinians — for example, “there are no innocents in Gaza” — in the same category, where ‘genocide’ is not necessarily in the sense of killing 90% of a population, though some Israeli leaders have called for that, but in the sense of deliberately destroying a people as a people). The argument instead is that protected speech includes such things as opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, accusing Israel of murder, torture, genocide, belief in a democratic one-state solution or in a two-state solution, belief in a Palestinian right to a state or even a right of return. All are within the realm of protected speech, and none of these on their face constitute anti-semitism, let alone calls for genocide of the Jews. (There are also ambiguities where “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” can mean a democratic one-state solution in which everyone has freedom and equal rights, or can mean driving the Jews into the sea; I’m inclined to think many/most of the protesters who used this slogan (which I would argue strongly against using) meant it in the best sense, but the people leading the chants might well not have. And again, for symmetry, many in Israel and supporters of Israel are arguing for Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea, and that needs equal attention, particularly since Israel actually has the power to achieve this and actually seems to be actively pursuing this.) Well, please excuse all the parentheticals. But, with a lot of respect, I think your point 3 is a straw man, and it would be better to deal with the arguments actually being made.
Vladimir #150: no, this does not shock me, I am well aware of it. But there was also clear evidence that these “nice family men” were practicing Nazis. There’s not a shred of evidence Khalil is any of the things he’s being wildly accused of or speculated to be; the accusations are based only on association, that he was involved in protests, a leader serving as a negotiator, and that some abominable things were said in those protests, things that many people in the protests did not subscribe to. Also, the testimony from Joseph Howley wasn’t that he was nice to his family and friends; it was quite specifically that, in the context of the protests, he was the opposite of what the speculations (but not even the administration statements so far) accuse him of, the equivalent of evidence *against* him being a practicing nazi:
“This is someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue. This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things. So it’s really disturbing to see that kind of misrepresentation of him.””
Comment #185 March 12th, 2025 at 1:36 am
Ranter #1 comment: “Humanities, social sciences, and other soft sciences, do not belong to universities anymore.” in fact, New York once had such a university – it was called the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Although it no longer exists as an independent academic entity (it has since been affiliated with various other NY universities), when i attended it in the sixties, it was quite excellent (we students used to say it was like MIT, but much better because its students were mostly New Yorkers and it didn’t offer degrees in non-STEM subjects). it was the best university environment i have ever been in, including my 30 years as a professor at a major research university.
Comment #186 March 12th, 2025 at 2:38 am
Scott #172: Why keep #3 at all? Especially when the people doing this are also in technical violation of the actually existing rules? (ie, time, place, and manner restrictions)
Comment #187 March 12th, 2025 at 7:08 am
Here’s liberal legal scholar Steve Vladeck, who strongly opposes Khalil’s deportation for many of the same reasons as people here, explaining why the government might nevertheless have a legal basis to deport him. If Vladeck doesn’t know, then I certainly don’t know either.
I’m glad that Khalil’s attorneys will apparently soon get to argue his case before Judge Jesse Furman, who was appointed by Obama and who clerked for Souter.
Comment #188 March 12th, 2025 at 7:28 am
Fulmenius #183:
I think, a more adequate description of the situation would be that they (Trump, Musk and their mignons) are literally Nazis…
I can’t help but picture Trump and Musk goose-stepping at the head of a parade of steaks, with swastika-shaped grill marks.
Comment #189 March 12th, 2025 at 7:40 am
Scott #139
“But there too, it takes only a minority of fanatical, rule-breaking, and sometimes violent anti-Zionists, and a majority unwilling or unable to stop that minority, for me to stop recommending Jews or Israelis to go to Columbia. Do you blame me?”
But then I wanted to ask: why do you even bother staying in academia?
You could be joining the private sector: you’d lose some freedom, but would make 10x the salary, would still be able to influence bright young minds with your ideas… all in an environment that’s infinitely safer than US campuses, where you could indeed be murdered.
It hasn’t happened in the US yet, but in France already two teachers have been beheaded/stabbed by Islamist terrorists, because of what they taught or their views on free speech were deemed offensive (the victims weren’t even Jewish).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Arras_school_stabbing
Comment #190 March 12th, 2025 at 7:56 am
Scott #187: Vladeck points out why they might, just might, have a legal basis for grabbing and deporting Khalil, and also why they might not (maybe even why they most likely don’t?). But he also discussed whether this is right or wrong, which is the subject that matters for those of us discussing this outside a courtroom. He says:
“I can’t write a post about this case without taking a moment to step back and reflect on what, exactly, is happening here. If the government had said that “there’s one specific LPR who is responsible for a unique amount of unlawful behavior relating to pro-Palestinian protests, and his case is special,” that would be one thing. But President Trump’s social media post makes clear that, at least from his perspective, Khalil’s is not a special case. And that, to me, is the scariest part—for it suggests that the government intends to use these rarely invoked removal authorities in enough cases to seek to deter non-citizens of any immigration status from speaking out about sensitive political issues, even in contexts in which the First Amendment does, or at least should, clearly protect their right to do so.
Conflating “pro-terrorist,” “anti-Semitic,” and “anti-American” activity is an incredibly dangerous step to take. The first one of those three may well render even a green card holder subject to removal. The second and third, by themselves, shouldn’t. And so although the government may have a bit more of a legal leg to stand on in Khalil’s case than one might’ve assumed at first blush, it sure doesn’t seem like it’s entitled to the benefit of any doubt as this case goes forward. If anything is anti-American, it’s threatening non-citizens who are in this country legally and have committed no crimes with the specter of being arrested, detained, and removed for doing nothing more than speaking up on behalf of unpopular causes—even, if not especially, unpopular causes with which many of us may well disagree.”
Comment #191 March 12th, 2025 at 8:54 am
Hi Scott,
Reading these comments and your post—and I’m not claiming that you **explicitly** said this—it’s hard not to come away with the impression that you feel like the biggest anti-semitic threat in America—at least at elite American college campuses—comes from the Left.
I’m going to show you some internet posts to prove the point that many anti-Semitic students at American colleges are themselves right-wing. The posts I will show you are only a tiny sample—rest assured you can find many right-wing students agreeing with these claims. The only question I ask you is—do you want these students deported, punished, expelled or reprimanded? Or are you more sympathetic to them, because despite their violent anti-Semitism, you agree with them on some social issues?
Here is my pertinent example—and as I said, you can find many other similar such posts, so this is not an isolated or freak phenomenon: it if from a thread on an inc*l forum site saying “there is no point in blaming women.” I won’t link it here, but if you’re curious I could send you the link via DM.
In this thread, an inc*l who is a university student (I checked his history, he says he goes to an elite school, so Ivy League or Stanford or MIT?) blamed Jews and “globalists” for his involuntary celibacy and loneliness. He says that Jews masterminded a system that disenfrachised inc*ls and less attractive males and denied them female companionship. He says that before Jews “invented modernity,” “males could be provided females” through arranged marriage (!); but that the Jews’ invention of feminism freed the women to “pursue Chads and bad boys” instead of the good men like him. Disgusting and shocking.
Another commenter on this thread says: “Not true most foids weren’t acting this way before (((they))) came in and introduced feminism. Normies are also a product of THEM. No one used to act like normies and modern foids do before (((they))) started influencing soyciety.” Clearly referring to Jews using the anti-semitic three parentheses thing.
There’s countless posts you can find just like this. Anti-semitic conspiracy theories and inc*l ideology go hand in hand.
So again, my question to you is—if a university student (at, say, Columbia, or Harvard, etc.) was posting comments like this online at inc*l forums, do you think they should be expelled? If they’re on a green card, should they be deported? Or should such sanctions be reserved to the gentle, moderate critics of Israel who happen to have an Arab background; like Mahmoud Khalil?
I’m not trying to trap you or anything. I really am curious, and I just want a yes-or-no answer to this question. I’m serious. Do you think that students posting this stuff should be expelled, or not? It will help everyone here to understand your position better.
Comment #192 March 12th, 2025 at 9:22 am
Ken #190,
“which is the subject that matters for those of us discussing this outside a courtroom”
Yeah, I see *lots* of comments in this thread going beyond whether it is right or wrong, but specifically saying that the administration has definitively broken the law or violated his due process rights.
Vladeck points out that such comments are overstated. It *hasn’t* definitively been shown that the administration broke the law or violated his due process rights. That may well be shown *in the future*, but as of now the best we can say is: we don’t know.
That’s what Scott, Vladimir and myself are trying to point out. That such declarative statements about the legal question are overstated.
If you truly wish to discuss whether this is *right* or *wrong*, then by all means let’s discuss. For my part, if the administration can prove – in a court of law and thus be judicially accountable – that he supports Hamas which is a known terrorist organization, then I don’t think it is *wrong* to deport him. I grant that this is a big ‘if’ but until that question is argued in the courts and settled by the courts I’ll reserve judgement on whether I think it is *right* or *wrong* what the administration did here in this particular case.
Another way of saying it is I don’t think the first amendment should shield someone from deportation who is not a natural born citizen and openly advocates for a terrorist organization dedicated to the genocide of the Jewish people and I don’t think it unreasonable or wrong to say so.
Comment #193 March 12th, 2025 at 9:46 am
Adam Treat #192
The purpose of the first amendment, I presume, is to codify certain of those ‘inalienable rights’ with which ‘all men’ are endowed at birth, regardless of things such as citizenship status. As such, surely a non-citizen should have the same rights under the first amendment (and the second amendment, etc.) as a citizen, because after all ‘all men are created equally’. So if a citizen could not be legally deported, exiled, or similarly punished for a given speech act, because freedom of speech is a sacred right of all people, surely it is inconsistent to believe that otherwise law-abiding non-citizens should not be afforded the same protection, and hence be subject to deportation for speech acts that a citizen could engage in with impunity?
Comment #194 March 12th, 2025 at 10:38 am
Josiah #193,
Non-natural born citizenship in the United States and resident status is a limited resource. There are far more people who wish to claim this resource than can be reasonably allocated. As such, there are conditions people must meet to apply for such resource. It does not seem unreasonable to me that one of them should be not supporting a terrorist organization devoted to the genocide or the Jewish people. If they wish to practice their inalienable right to speech advocating for a terrorist organization let them do it in their native land.
Comment #195 March 12th, 2025 at 10:45 am
An aside.
I maybe be wrong, and I’d like to get US born citizens’ take on this.
It’s not something born US citizens must often think about (unless they marry a foreigner), but it’s always been a bit ironic to me that Naturalized US citizens are considered to be somewhat a lesser kind of citizen than US born citizens, who can’t get their citizenship revoked (unless they renounce it on their own).
The reason being that US born citizens are never taking officially the oath to the constitution, they just happened to pop into the world as babies inside the USA, with absolutely zero choice of their own. Now, I’m not aware that such citizens are required by law to take the oath once they reach adulthood age (it could be an option, I don’t know… please correct me if necessary).
On the other hand, Naturalized US citizens are making a deliberate choice at some point in their life to become US citizens and are taking an explicit oath to the constitution, which drives the point that such Naturalized US Citizens are explicitly committed, as self-determined agents, to become and be Americans.
But this very explicit choice is what makes such naturalized citizens vulnerable to having their citizenship revoked if it is suspected (and proved?) that they were not genuine when taking the oath. By genuine it seems the law means that you’re either a communist or a terrorist. Ironically, you’re allowed to keep prior citizenship to other countries (e.g. dual citizenship)… which undermines the oath imo.
This is something that can’t happen with US born citizens, since I guess, as a baby, they really had no choice, and were never asked explicitly to declare their strong support of America at any point when becoming an adult.
The other point is that pretty much every single US born citizen had an ancestor that was a Naturalized US citizen (unless they’re 100% native). That ancestor made the explicit choice to cross an ocean to come to the USA and become a citizen, with all the hardship it entails.
Do you, as a born US citizen, feel that you’re a more genuine American (for being born here as a baby) than that ancestor of yours?
Comment #196 March 12th, 2025 at 10:54 am
Fred #195,
No. I don’t feel more genuine, but there is an unavoidable fact of my existence: I have no other prior native land. A natural born citizen could be exiled, but not deported to a country of origin. It makes sense for someone who made the explicit choice to come here to be held to a higher standard because they presumably consciously made the choice knowing full well the obligations that come with it. One of those obligations that doesn’t seem unreasonable is not to support a terrorist organization dedicated to genocide against the Jewish people.
FWIW, the administration is saying he personally was handing out fliers that were printed with Hamas’ logo and explicitly celebrating October 7th. Of course, they still have to _prove_ it is true, but if it were then I think that would constitute explicit support and thus make him subject to deportation.
Comment #197 March 12th, 2025 at 10:57 am
Forgot one more point:
I know a few people who have a “strong” US citizenship (i.e. born in the US), but spent their entire adult life outside the US, on another citizenship, because their parents were on a student visas in the US, and their mom got pregnant and they were born in the US, got the citizenship automatically, then the family went back to their country of origin.
Again quite ironic that such people have a more secure citizenship than someone who took the oath as an adult.
Comment #198 March 12th, 2025 at 11:01 am
Adam Treat #194
Why must citizenship in the United States be a limited resource? We have a much lower population density than many other advanced economies, e.g. Japan and South Korea. And if were genuinely to start to get too many people, the supply vs demand problem should take care of itself. Surely citizenship is not the one domain where free market principles should be ignored?
fred #195
My own feeling is that all states have a moral obligation to offer citizenship on an equal basis to all comers (at least those willing to make some minimal demonstration of loyalty) regardless of background or where they happen to be born, and that these should be treated no differently than any other citizen. Anything less is unacceptably illiberal.
Comment #199 March 12th, 2025 at 11:10 am
Obviously my questions have no unique answer, because there’s really no such thing as “a country” outside of the ideas inside the brains of the people who live on that piece of land.
I.e. a country is defined by a community of people who agree on a set of values and laws.
And when those values and laws are being thrown in the trash and forcefully rewritten by the ruling government (a minority of citizens that are entrusted by the majority and given a monopoly on violence), the concept of “the country” is seriously undermined.
Comment #200 March 12th, 2025 at 12:20 pm
Adam Treat #196
There’s always the option of picking one of the countries tied to their ancestors who did get naturalized, e.g. Germany for Trump. The only genuine Americans who can’t get “sent back” are native Indians.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the Trump administration handles citizenship once it takes over Canada as the 51st state.
Are they going to have the entire Canadian population implicitly become US citizen, or do individual oaths?
And for the few Canadians who refuse to take the oath, where are they going to be deported to? Probably England, or France for people in Quebec… :_D
Comment #201 March 12th, 2025 at 12:57 pm
Adam Treat #196: And during the Cold War it would’ve been perfectly fine by you to deport green card holders who joined the Communist Party? Or, suppose Trump decided that the Labour Party was a terrorist organization. Should a green card holder who’d handed out Labour Party pamphlets be deportable?
Josiah #198: My own feeling about states and citizenship is the same as yours, and I think it’s this tension–between a moral commitment to civil liberties and the desire to have a democracy in which by design all citizens do not in fact have equal standing–that accounts for a lot of the disagreements in these threads.
Comment #202 March 12th, 2025 at 1:27 pm
Many people have used the fact that some of the legal authority that might be invoked against Khalil was last invoked in the 1950s as a reductio ad absurdum (reductio ad McCarthyum?): surely we don’t want to return to that evil time?
What’s inconvenient for this position is that, after the fall of the USSR, during the brief period when scholars could access Soviet archives, they confirmed beyond doubt that the USSR really did maintain a vast network of fellow-travelers in the US as agents, with the ultimate goal of destroying the US. (Just like Putin presumably does today, ironically.)
So even when we look at that era, as reprehensible as Joe McCarthy surely was, we do need to look at each case on its individual merits, rather than assuming that any accused Communist agent was just an innocent victim of McCarthyism. (Julius Rosenberg, to take one example, 100% was a Soviet nuclear spy, and his wife Ethel was 100% well-aware of it.)
Comment #203 March 12th, 2025 at 1:37 pm
John #201,
“the Communist Party? Or, suppose Trump decided that the Labour Party was a terrorist organization. Should a green card holder who’d handed out Labour Party pamphlets be deportable?“
Dunno. In this hypothetical has the Communist Party or Labour Party committed atrocities comparable to what Hamas did on the 7th? Are they committed to committing more such atrocities in the future? If so, then the answer would be yes I guess.
Comment #204 March 12th, 2025 at 1:45 pm
Scott #202
A very weak equivalence.
In that situation, the USSR was indeed an existential threat to the USA: it was the freakin’ cold war, with each side at a standstill threatening nuclear annihilation.
Hamas and whatever Palestinian authorities certainly don’t measure up to it, and they don’t threaten directly US national security (a few American citizenship holders were taken on Oct 7th, but that’s also true of France, etc… and there are lots of American citizenship holders unjustly imprisoned throughout the world, e.g. Russian, Iran, … and that doesn’t constitute much of a national security threat).
Also, if it’s all about terrorism, we’d treat equally the support of any terrorist organization… but I doubt that someone distributing pamphlets related to the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, or the PKK on US campus would have got/get the same treatment, right?
Of course one can make the argument that Hamas is just part of the larger Islamic terrorism threat, and then given that the US conducted a “war on terror”, it just follows… But noone is making that link much
The reason is that Israel is the only foreign country that has so much ties and leverage on the US government that it can apparently override actual US National Security interests.
Comment #205 March 12th, 2025 at 2:01 pm
And it goes without saying that it’s also the very same strong ties with Israel that spurred the US campus protests – one side is emotionally/ancestrally tied to Israel, and the other feels like the US is too subservient to an Israeli government (not saying those ties are wrong and can’t be explained historically, it’s just a stating of the facts).
And we never see clashes on US campuses with one camp supporting Turkey and rejecting the PKK, and the other side protesting the campus support’s of Turkey, or the way Turkey is treating the Kurds, etc. Why is that?
I’m not saying that there’s a one to one mapping with Hamas and Israel, but it’s just as a serious situation for Turks and Kurds.
Comment #206 March 12th, 2025 at 2:16 pm
It’s also obvious that Israel is an ally of the US.
But then explain to me why, for the Trump administration, it’s apparently more of an ally than Canada, France, UK, and the rest of Europe.
Actually now it’s as if Israel is our *only* ally that we would support with no question asked, to the point that we’re now considering weakening/stripping fundamental principles of citizenship to go along…
except that such a one-sided relation wasn’t always the case:
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-to-attacks-in-a-blunt-telephone-call-to-begin.html
Comment #207 March 12th, 2025 at 2:21 pm
@Scott 202: of course we’d have had to look at each case individually during that era. The point is that simply expressing sympathy with or even enthusiasm for the Communist party and its aims wasn’t or shouldn’t have been a crime.
Comment #208 March 12th, 2025 at 2:25 pm
I do want to reiterate that the “Jewish students are terrified of campus Palestinians” is really out of touch with what students are actually afraid of on American college campuses. Several people in this thread are already pointing out that the incidents at Columbia were hugely exaggerated, the task force report was biased and/or incomplete, pro-Palestine activists got along well with Jewish students, etc. So I’m not going to continue beating that dead horse. Instead, I’d like to continue pointing out that many college students ARE genuinely terrified of the incel/alt-right/Andrew Tate-fan/edgy male students on their campuses. The “discord kids,” if you will.
I already showed you some nasty posts on incel forums—BY A STUDENT AT AN IVY LEAGUE CAMPUS—saying anti-Semitic shit. I have Jewish friends at the University of Chicago and they tell me they’ve first-hand seen far more anti-semitism from the “discord kids” than any activist. One told me they’ve first-hand seen make him feel unwelcome on the campus. Of course they’re not a majority, but enough of the Gen Z males going into college the past couple years have been misogynist, incel, and racist to make the campus a nasty place.
I know many women students who are terrified of these kids. They feel unwelcome as a woman at the university because so many of the young males here are misogynistic, “edgy” and violent. They like to run over women in video games. They like to try pick-up artist stuff around the campus and make women uncomfortable. They like to whine and complain about how no women wants them, and sometimes say violent things about women. I know one eoman student at UChicago whose boyfriend’s roomate, who is an avid gamer, would say uncomfortable and misogynistic “incel” stuff about her, to the point where the boyfriend had to seitch rooms. No disciplinary action happened to the kid. They make classes and socializing scary, grueling and uncomfortable for women students.
Why isn’t the government using Title VI and Title IX to expel THESE students? Why is the government expelling gentle activists instead of the angry misogynistic gamer boys who make college scary and uncofmortable for women AND also hate Jews more than the most fanatical “pro-Hamas” activist? Why haven’t you blogged about THEIR anti-semitism on college campuses?
Comment #209 March 12th, 2025 at 2:33 pm
And if you think that the fight against antisemitism is worth the risk of reconsidering freedom of speech in the US and weakening citizenship, fine.
But is Hamas really a graver threat to US national security than Russia and China, which constantly succeed at undermining Western democratic institutions?
Yet the T. Administration just decided to shutdown the office that handles cyberattack and counter-attacks with Russia (that’s of course one detail in the general move to turn our back on our closest European allies and a shocking pivot towards Putin).
Tik-tok was seen by the Supreme Court as a grave threat to National Security, and deserved being banned, yet the T. Administration overrode their decision (!)… because apparently the youth of the country being influenced online by China is okay, in the name of freedom of speech, etc.
We all know why all those things are really happening: they’re not ideological, we’re seeing the wholesale dismantling of American institutions and values in exchange for cash, it’s as simple as that.
Comment #210 March 12th, 2025 at 2:52 pm
Adam Treat #143: Another interesting discussion from Bloomberg Law can be found here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-03-12/bloomberg-law-ice-arrests-activist-law-firm-targeted-podcast
Comment #211 March 12th, 2025 at 3:36 pm
And to point out a final contradiction:
We have Trump saying he’s gonna combat antisemitism here in the US, with zero tolerance, with what is effectively a restriction on free speech which covers everything from pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel-government, anti-Zionism, all the way to pro-Hamas.
And simultaneously we have Musk promoting the AfD, backed by JD Vance going around in Europe, lecturing them that they’re turning their back on freedom of speech, in particular censoring their own far-right/neo-Nazi parties and their message, using as an example the German strong anti-nazi expression laws, which have been created to combat actual clear antisemitism (the type that directly lead to concentration camps within a few years)…
Comment #212 March 12th, 2025 at 3:48 pm
Adam Treat #203: well, we viewed Communism/Communists as a much bigger threat to the US in that era than we view Hamas as being now. But OK, we can agree to disagree on whether membership in the Communist Party should’ve been protected speech. I think yours has been a somewhat fringe view for decades now, but maybe it’s coming back. Yay.
In related news, this from The NY Times is incredibly depressing. Exactly what Trump was hoping for:
“Days after immigration officers arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist, administrators at Columbia University gathered students and faculty from the journalism school and issued a warning.
Students who were not U.S. citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine and protests related to their former classmate’s arrest, urged Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor. With about two months to go before graduation, their academic accomplishments — or even their freedom — could be at risk if they attracted the ire of the Trump administration.“
Comment #213 March 12th, 2025 at 3:49 pm
I have a meta level question about the role of a university. I always thought it was about giving the students an academic education.
Why on earth are they wasting time protesting and what not? Why is that ever ok to do? Why don’t they focus on their studies?
I have a hard time understanding this.
Comment #214 March 12th, 2025 at 4:29 pm
Qwerty #213
Because that’s what young minds do as they develop out of childhood and realize they play a role in a larger world, they feel a new huge responsibility and think they can make a difference. Especially true for kids whose family is pretty well off and are uncomfortable with their privilege.
So many they tend to latch onto a particular issue and become very extreme about it.
When I was a teenager, I became very opinionated against the death penalty. I remember arguing very aggressively with some of my adult relatives over this, even if it didn’t affect me personally in the least.
Later on many of my peers in Engineering school had very violent arguments about the first Gulf War… a couple of fist fights happened in between classes… and those were Gen-X STEM nerds before the internet even existed!
Comment #215 March 12th, 2025 at 4:34 pm
What better place is there to find legalistic talmudic pilpul then a shtetl ?
Comment #216 March 12th, 2025 at 6:14 pm
@qwerty #213: Students have the same first amendment rights as anyone else. Personally I was dismayed by the encampments, but not because the students were exercising these rights. In a democracy, we should strive for civic engagement, no matter how busy we are. (I was dismayed by the content of their speech, which was centered on “vengeance” – in fact literally so, in the slogans displayed above the encampment here.) However, the first amendment does not require universities to provide a platform for any and all expressions of free speech. It is our responsibility to maintain a focus on our chief functions such as education, scholarship, and research.
Comment #217 March 12th, 2025 at 6:25 pm
Scott #202:
> So even when we look at that era, as reprehensible as Joe McCarthy surely was, we do need to look at each case on its individual merits, rather than assuming that any accused Communist agent was just an innocent victim of McCarthyism. (Julius Rosenberg, to take one example, 100% was a Soviet nuclear spy, and his wife Ethel was 100% well-aware of it.)
Here again, I want to avoid commenting on the main question. But the Rosenberg trial also suggests a pitfall: after all, the government pressured the key witness (David Greengrass) to exaggerate Ethel Rosenberg’s implication, and got her sentenced to death with little evidence of active complicity (as a quick Wikipedia skim suggests).
We may judge each case on the merits, but it’s good to remember that a government claiming national security can put a lot of weight on the scales of justice in ways that can be difficult to notice or balance.
Relatedly:
> What’s inconvenient for this position is that […] the USSR really did maintain a vast network of fellow-travelers in the US as agents
I didn’t know that, but I am not surprised. However, I find this inconvenient, but struggle to see this fact as actually damaging.
I’m not too well-versed in American history, but I don’t think the strength of the case against McCarthyism isn’t that it was based on a big bout of paranoia (although (a) it certainly can’t help and (b) broken clocks do tell the truth sometimes, even if they’re US Representatives, have a trumped-up war record and, as the line goes, no decency at all).
It’s rather the discrepancy between the gravity of the accusations and the triviality of the evidence (most of which apparently consisted of actions that would have been staples of proudly American freedoms), the un-seriousness of its process, the depth of the guilt by mere suspicion.
***
In a completely unrelated way – but this is a missive to the Editor, so I can’t see why not bring it up – what did you find so masterful about Zvi Mowshowitz’s K-12 piece? I mean, sure, less pointy-haired teachers bothering advanced students, less closing advanced programs for bad reasons, and allowing to skip grades where it’s not possible seem pretty good – but for the, like, 2% of students who could be concerned by it?
Ful disclosure because I sound dismissive – I am not from the US and I skipped two grades at an early age. I spent most of my childhood in “okay” schools in the neighborhood (my high-school was pretty solid, but still public without any special “gifted” program) and while I’ve had my share of stupid teachers, annoying classes, busywork and other frustrating moments I stopped thinking of school as hell or anything remotely like it by the age of 5.
I am probably very mistaken about what’s broken with the American K-12 system, having never interacted with it. But unless it works fine for the remaining 98%, you can’t actually fix it by reinventing a version of classroom that doesn’t properly scale, requires a high density of degree-holders with the ability to take an afternoon off work in your neighborhood, and assumes that your kid is already bright. Nor is the possibility to remove students a fix for the system – this may be saving the student who’s lucky enough to have parents that can chime in, but this is still leaving everyone else to their fate.
The two points Zvi Mowshowitz makes that are not destined to his tribe are sleep and “firing bad teachers and finding good teachers”. Sleep is of course a huge deal and has been advocated as such in education research but regarding the teachers, there’s barely any curiosity as to the current state of things.
There’s no meaningful discussion of that change-of-teacher study (apart from “if the rookies scored better on average on the tests then they were smarter so they had to be better teachers from the get-go”), or interrogation about what caused the current state of things. Culture? Money? Bureaucracy? Perverse incentives shifting all around because everyone fumbles around trying to Do Something? Teachers needing to LARP the Stern Disciplinarian because they’re deep down terrified of their students?
He’s barely wondering how things work (or fail) in other countries, not just on paper (my guess is that the systems look a lot like each other in theory) but how they actually operate.
But mostly, my point is that his piece reads mostly like “take your kids out of the system and let it collapse”. Which is not a fix under any definition, but if you treat it as one, then maybe I missed something important?
Comment #218 March 12th, 2025 at 7:45 pm
Qwerty # 213
Protests are known to be an effective way for students to get out of class when Spring weather arrives. Happens every year, like a snow storm at the ides of March.
Comment #219 March 12th, 2025 at 9:05 pm
Scott #53 Given your usually well considered opinion I find your stance on Mahmoud Khalil surprising. No matter what he is accused of he has a right to due process. Having a permanent resident just disappear in the ICE prison system, so that even his lawyers couldn’ locate him for quite some time, sets a terrible precedence.
He still cannot talk to them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-detention-hearing.html
From my vantage point the current administration uses Antisemitism as a fig leaf to expand its extra legal authorities.
Comment #220 March 12th, 2025 at 9:34 pm
Henning #219: I’ve reiterated throughout this thread that he has a right to due process. As I said in #187, I’m glad that his attorneys get to argue for his release before Judge Furman, who was appointed by Obama and who clerked for Souter.
How could people possibly read what I wrote and imagine I said he shouldn’t get all the due process to which he’s entitled under law, when I specifically said that he should? I’m not sure, but it might be related to how a decade ago, tens of thousands of people read my comment about how we should cling to feminism and other liberal values no matter what, and decided I was actually saying that all women should be my sex slaves.
Comment #221 March 12th, 2025 at 9:43 pm
Soctt: In post #122 I pointed out what seems to be a simple factual problem with your original post (concerning the claim of ““students […] having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night”).
Perhaps you missed it (maybe it should have been earlier in my post), but I would have thought you’d want to correct it.
Comment #222 March 12th, 2025 at 11:36 pm
Adam Treat #192: “if the administration can prove – in a court of law and thus be judicially accountable – that he supports Hamas which is a known terrorist organization, then I don’t think it is *wrong* to deport him. I grant that this is a big ‘if’ but until that question is argued in the courts and settled by the courts I’ll reserve judgement on whether I think it is *right* or *wrong* what the administration did here in this particular case.”
The problem here is that just because a guy is of Palestinian origin and was involved in the anti-Gaza war protests, you’re willing to assume, with zero evidence having been presented, that it’s likely enough that he’s a Hamas supporter that you’re willing to say “so far I don’t object to this”. A guy with a green card is seized (and whisked off to Louisiana where the court is extremely conservative and not allowed to talk to a lawyer, which I think obviously violated due process by any common sense measure even though perhaps there is some unknown-to-me, bizarre legal argument for allowing it) on nothing more than being involved in actions “aligned with Hamas” and that the Sec’y of State has declared that he is a danger to our foreign policy — not a shred of argument or evidence of anything more. Yet you’re willing to say “he’s Palestinian, he’s actively against the Gaza war, so I think he’s likely to be a Hamas supporter even though the people accusing him have not even cited that as an argument (Trump did in blathering, but not in any official statements or documents about the seizure), let alone provided any evidence to that effect. On its face, doing what they did for the reasons they have given, this is seizure of someone for speech the gov’t disapproves of, this is tyranny, this is the end of the first amendment. But your prejudice — call it a prior if you want — is so strong that you fill in what you consider to be good reasons, and refuse to base a judgement on the actual action with the actual reasons and (lack of) evidence that have been given. When that actual action for the reasons and evidence that have been given threatens the very foundation of our democracy. Think about it. (and Scott, I think your arguments are equivalent to Adam’s, tho correct me if I’m wrong.)
Comment #223 March 13th, 2025 at 12:10 am
Scott #202: “What’s inconvenient for this position is that, after the fall of the USSR, during the brief period when scholars could access Soviet archives, they confirmed beyond doubt that the USSR really did maintain a vast network of fellow-travelers in the US as agents, with the ultimate goal of destroying the US. (Just like Putin presumably does today, ironically.)
So even when we look at that era, as reprehensible as Joe McCarthy surely was, we do need to look at each case on its individual merits, rather than assuming that any accused Communist agent was just an innocent victim of McCarthyism. (Julius Rosenberg, to take one example, 100% was a Soviet nuclear spy, and his wife Ethel was 100% well-aware of it.)”
Scott, I think you’re missing some context for understanding that history. In the 1930’s, with capitalism collapsing, the great depression, and the relatively new Soviet Union appearing as a great shining alternative of a better system for working people, any idealist young person who wanted a better world was likely to be on the left and sympathetic to socialism and communism and, if they wanted to be politically active, likely to join the communist party. For many it was sort of a leftist reading/study group, and not much more than that. That was what it meant to be progressive in the 1930’s, it did not involve a desire to destroy the US. In fact many many lefties, whether or not they were ever members of the communist party, loved FDR and went to work for the government because they saw it doing so many progressive things. They were New Deal lefties. Gradually as the horrors of Stalin and Stalinism slowly became apparent, more and more people became disaffected with the party itself until almost all had left the party behind, I’m not sure the exact timing but people were leaving in the 1940’s and certainly mostly gone by the 1950’s. Very few were what you could call agents. In the McCarthy period, and actually starting in 1946 or 1947 with Truman’s loyalty hearings for government employees, anyone with leftist sympathies was accused of being a communist (or “disloyal”, in the loyalty hearings) and many were blacklisted, lost their jobs, etc. Some had indeed been members of the communist party at some time, a few may have still been, but basically almost all were just people with what we would now call progressive ideas, people who believed in the New Deal. And the goal, much as the Trump administration now, was to repress and as much as possible destroy and/or remove from public life anyone with progressive-thought, starting with the loyalty hearings trying to purge them out of gov’t after so many had joined to support the New Deal. It really had almost nothing to do with being Soviet agents or wanting to destroy the US. Woody Guthrie was I believe a member of the party for some period, and is there anyone who more deeply loved the US, more eloquently wrote hymns to what was wonderful about it?
It’s of course true that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet agent (a relatively minor one, Klaus Fuchs was I believe a much bigger one in terms of what he transmitted), he did not transmit “the secret of the atomic bomb”, and what he transmitted was not to an enemy at the time but to a wartime ally, which does not at all justify it but are reasons why what he did was not death penalty material. But they killed him anyways. My understanding was the gov’t knew that Ethel had no significant involvement but charged her in order to try to get Julius to confess to get her released, but he wouldn’t, so they killed her too and orphaned their kids. Yes, he was guilty of something, but what happened was also due to the kind of right-wing manufactured hysteria against the left that we’re also seeing now.
If you’re interested, a good book on the loyalty hearings, which were the beginning of what became the McCarthy period, and how it helped purge the government of progressive ideas for decades, is The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left,
https://www.amazon.com/Unmaking-Politics-Society-Twentieth-Century-America/dp/0691166749/ref=sr_1_1
Comment #224 March 13th, 2025 at 12:48 am
Scott #220 My apologies I should have carefully read through your other comments. This case just strikes me as such a travesty. Utilizing the plight of the Jewish minority to advance authoritarianism in America is not something I would have anticipated in my wildest dreams.
Comment #225 March 13th, 2025 at 1:26 am
Scott #172: I suspect there might be a similarly trenchant and nuanced analysis pertaining to other actions taken by Trump and his Administration. Each such action is still open to a democratic debate.
But it is the totality of such reckless actions taken by the current Administration that should be kept in mind — thereby perhaps precluding (or rendering ill-advised) –somewhat partisan bickering, at least for the moment.
We are, in fact, witnessing an incipient constitutional crisis, I am afraid, yet to be resolved (of our own making to be sure).
Comment #226 March 13th, 2025 at 3:34 am
PS. Can Israel survive without US support? Most likely, yes, I pray. Can “the civilization of the Enlightenment” endure, with Trump and his Administration in charge of its citadel for four more years? I am far less certain, I am afraid, at this juncture.
Comment #227 March 13th, 2025 at 4:18 am
It could be that saying he deserves due process, *even though he wants your family murdered and even though he wants to finish what the nazis started* reads a lot like “give this man a fair trial and execute him”.
Personally I’m resigned to the fact that when it comes to anything Israel/Palestine you’re as lopsided as they come. I accept it and find excuses for it. I even try to agree with you whenever I can, like I would with an old parent or dear relative with weird views they’ve held on to all their lives.
Comment #228 March 13th, 2025 at 7:07 am
H #227:
It could be that saying he deserves due process, *even though he wants your family murdered and even though he wants to finish what the nazis started* reads a lot like “give this man a fair trial and execute him”.
Then I guess you need to read more carefully! The whole point of a fair trial is that it could have either outcome — that we admit there are facts we don’t yet know that could sway things — and much of the point of a liberal society is that it allows me to coexist even with some number of people who hate me and want me dead.
As for whether Khalil does want that … I mean, have you read the recent manifestos from CUAD? They praise Sinwar and Nasrallah (and also Chairman Mao!), and call for global jihad as part of the glorious, bloody liberation struggle against capitalism and imperialism and America.
The only counterargument would be if Khalil somehow helped organize this group without reading its material or sharing its beliefs (or if he disavowed them after their radical turn this past fall, which afaik he didn’t).
Comment #229 March 13th, 2025 at 7:23 am
Ken #223: AFAIK, accurate information about Stalin’s horrors (including the Holodomor) was actually available in the West soon after they happened. It’s just that the information was dismissed as right-wing propaganda (much like contemporaneous reports of the Holocaust were dismissed as Jewish propaganda). In this case, however, the right-wing propaganda was 100% correct, and that was knowable at the time by anyone who cared to look into it. Similarly with Mao’s atrocities.
Given that, I’m not inclined to be sympathetic to the Western Stalin and Mao apologists of the mid-20th-century on the grounds that “that was just what you did back then” and “all the other with-it progressives were doing it.” I admire those leftists, like Bertrand Russell, who saw through the Soviet Union almost from the beginning and clearly said: no, this is not what I want.
Of course even people with horrifying beliefs, like “the Holodomor never happened but if it did happen it was good,” may still have had their constitutional rights trampled. But a defense of their constitutional rights loses its credibility when it also tries to justify the belief.
Comment #230 March 13th, 2025 at 7:57 am
Ken #222,
That’s exactly right. In this I am joined by none other than the Obama appointed federal judge in New York who had the power yesterday in court to order his immediate release and declined to do so. Why? Because the administration has proffered they have a case and will be sharing the proof in upcoming proceedings. He has not yet been deported. The courts do have jurisdiction and the administration will be held accountable for presenting the evidence they have for judicial review.
Your position is that I am obliged to make up my mind right now and denounce this as a miscarriage of justice and patently against the law. But I am not so obliged. I am allowed to wait for the facts to come in and for the courts to do their job and to withhold judgement. Sorry, but your impassioned plea that I respond with sufficient outrage in a reactionary way I will decline.
Comment #231 March 13th, 2025 at 8:19 am
Scott #228: do you have any information one way or another about whether he stayed with CUAD in the October 2024 schism, or left it and joined the new organization as many did?
Comment #232 March 13th, 2025 at 8:37 am
Scott #229: So you think that anyone who was not insightful enough to know what was propaganda and what was not — at a time when there *was* lots of false right wing propaganda about the Soviet Union, as well as true reports – and joined the CP for some period in their youth for idealistic reasons, during a great depression when people were suffering enormously from what certainly appeared to be the failures and injustices of capitalism — and the many others who were simply their friends and associates — this whole set of people, most of whom were basically New Deal liberals — all deserved to be purged from society in the McCarthy period? Don’t you see that that was a right wing effort to destroy left and progressive thought, very much like the trump admin today? It was not an effort to root out Soviet agents who wanted to destroy the US, any more than today’s purges are an attempt to root out marxists who want to destroy our society as Trump claims.
Comment #233 March 13th, 2025 at 8:46 am
Scott #229 p.s. I don’t doubt that there were some genuine attempts somewhere by someone(s) to root out Soviet agents. But that’s not what the McCarthy period or the preceding loyalty hearings were about.
Comment #234 March 13th, 2025 at 8:51 am
Scott #228
“I mean, have you read the recent manifestos from CUAD? They praise Sinwar and Nasrallah (and also Chairman Mao!), “
That “they praise Chairman Mao!” emphasis that’s supposed to terrify us is pretty cute considering that 1.4 billion people are now again actively praising him after Xi revived Mao as a major national figure :_D
https://i.imgur.com/zVc4Qop.jpeg
Comment #235 March 13th, 2025 at 8:54 am
Scott #229: your historical account is not convincing. Apply your analysis to Oppenheimer. Was he a dupe? Evil? What?
Comment #236 March 13th, 2025 at 8:57 am
Ken #231: No, does anyone else? I was hoping that would come out soon at the hearing. (Incidentally, the fact that the Obama-appointed Judge Furman could’ve ordered Khalil immediately returned to New York or even released, but elected not to do so until he hears the government’s case, is already nontrivial information.)
Comment #237 March 13th, 2025 at 9:01 am
Scott #234: I’m not sure what you’re reading into the judge’s decision here, but it does not seem to me like it’s nontrivial information.
Comment #238 March 13th, 2025 at 9:10 am
Adam Treat #230: Yes a judge must take even the most outrageous government actions and play them out through the procedures of the law. And it’s possible the law will allow a green card holder to be deported for nothing more than speech the government dislikes. But we as citizens can recognize how dangerous it is when the government can seize someone, and transport them with no lawyer contact, based on nothing more than government claims that his actions were “aligned with Hamas” and are a threat to our foreign policy (I forget the exact wording of the latter claim). And you could examine the prejudices or priors that lead you to make assumptions about his likely support for Hamas when even the government has made no such claim to date and no one anywhere has presented any evidence of this.
But we’re obviously not going to converge in our thinking.
Comment #239 March 13th, 2025 at 9:12 am
Ken #232: You’re asking about some of the most complicated political/psychological questions that there are. Yes, there has to be room for people to be stupid, to make youthful idealistic mistakes—if, crucially, they acknowledge their mistakes later. Yes, it was possible for naïve, idealistic idiots of the 1930s to think, “American society has all these problems, therefore whatever Stalin is building must be better”—just like the idiots of today think, “America and Israel do lots of bad things, therefore whatever alternative Iran, Hamas, and the Houthis are trying to create must be superior.”
On the other hand, when a Western leftist hears about the Holodomor or Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward and says in so many words, “well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”—the question is, why should I be more charitable than I’d be to a far-rightist who has the same reaction to hearing about the Holocaust? Am I supposed to cut the leftist a break because their being on the left and not the right means that their heart was basically in the right place? This is precisely the step that I reject, and a lot of the rest of my beliefs follow from that rejection.
Comment #240 March 13th, 2025 at 9:24 am
John #235: Yes, Oppenheimer was a great man and also a Communist dupe. That the American war machine and a bunch of eye-wateringly naïve Jewish Communists and fellow-travelers were able to put aside their differences for long enough to build the first nuclear weapons is one of the most extraordinary things that’s ever happened.
Comment #241 March 13th, 2025 at 9:40 am
Ken #238,
The fact that an Obama appointed judge had the opportunity to order his immediate release or transfer and declined to do so renders suspect that we can know right now an outrageous miscarriage of justice has taken place. You wish to jump to that conclusion and howl in outrage. That is your right. But I decline to follow. Instead I will suspend judgement until I know more.
You say my determination to withhold judgement and decline to howl in outrage is informed by my priors and biases. That’s probably true, but the bias is in favor of non-reactionary thinking and hesitation to proclaim I know more than I actually do. I think those are good priors and biases. Your mileage might vary.
FWIW, the administration _has_ accused him of personally distributing flyers that had Hamas media logo on them and that celebrated the attack on the 7th. This accusation hasn’t been tested yet in a court of law, but if it is true and holds up then from my POV deportation would not necessarily be inappropriate.
Comment #242 March 13th, 2025 at 9:53 am
Take those two cases:
– When Kanye started saying all sorts of things about Jews and then started to praise Hitler (still doing it to this day):
https://www.ajc.org/news/5-of-kanye-wests-antisemitic-remarks-explained
https://variety.com/2025/music/news/kanye-west-sued-staffer-hitler-nazi-1236303857/
– Musk and Bannon started throwing Sieg Heils around.
Maybe some people will insist that doesn’t count as antisemitism, sure.
But at least, in those two cases, we know exactly what happened because it was for the whole world to see with their own two eyes.
In the case of Mr Khalil, finding the evidence seems much harder, at least for me (but Prof. Aaronson seems to have access to his Mossad file :P)…
so indeed we’ll have to wait for the whole case to play out, i.e. after the judge gets the data, etc.
Btw, Kanye and Bannon are born US citizens, but Musk is naturalized, so maybe he should be more cautious when aligning himself with Nazis?
Comment #243 March 13th, 2025 at 10:03 am
I find this piece about the legal case for the deportation of the Islamist Mahmoud Khalil quite illuminating. I think that any non-biased individual understands now that the legal case for deportation is strong and straightforward (given that this individual open support for Hamas’ actions is documented through his advocacy to CUAD, being among the leaders of the violent Columbia riots, and other instances).
—-
“Here’s why Mahmoud Khalil will be deported, without a doubt. Bookmark and share this.
1. Legal permanent residents are still aliens subject to 8 USC 1182 and 8 USC 1227, and thus explicitly deportable for any speech expressing support for designated terrorist organizations or statutorily defined “terrorist activities,” as well as deportable for foreign policy grounds at the sole determination of the Secretary of State and/or AG.
These are not crimes, but they don’t have to be. They are removal grounds under 8 USC 1182 and 8 USC 1227. No criminal conviction is required to remove aliens. IF a crime is committed, it can serve as grounds for removal, but no allegation of criminal misconduct is necessary.
2. No due process has been denied. He is entitled to a basic statement that he is being detained and subject to removal proceedings, and he got one, and he’s entitled to a removal hearing before being deported, and he’ll get one.
3. He is not missing. The ICE detention database, available to the public, clearly lists that he is in a detention facility in Louisiana.
4. These actions are not being done in the name of “Jewish safety.” They are being done on the basis of expressing support for terrorism organizations or activities and on foreign policy grounds which is the prerogative of the Secretary of State and/or AG.
5. Separately, though no crime of “material” support of terrorism (or any other crime) is legally necessary to deport an alien, his distribution of pamphlets with Hamas iconography and language is “material” support (yes, producing and distributing documents is considered material support — look it up — just like other forms of “material” support like direct financial assistance).
6. This is an open-and-shut case. At the removal hearing, the government will recite the above, and the judge will affirm that these recitations have been made. On the “foreign policy” grounds of 8 USC 1227 alone, Mahmoud Kahlil is deportable and the government’s declaration that his presence is contrary to foreign policy is non-reviewable. The judge is not entitled to second-guess this; the judge can only require that this invocation be made by the government, and indeed, this invocation will be made.”
Comment #244 March 13th, 2025 at 10:05 am
Adam Treat #241: various MAGAoids have made accusations about Hamas flyers, but have any official statements or fillings about the seizure of Khalil made that accusation? I haven’t seen it.
Comment #245 March 13th, 2025 at 10:12 am
In this context, I was looking back at those cases of Islamist Clerics in the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Qatada_al-Filistini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Hamza_al-Masri
In one case it’s interesting that the guy was actually extradited from the UK to the US, to rot in jail and be fed by tax payer dollars for the rest of his life…
So there’s a fine line between being aligned enough with terrorism to warrant visa/citizenship revocation and deportation, but not to the point that you’d end up in US jail.
Comment #246 March 13th, 2025 at 10:16 am
Scott #235: easy to say that in retrospect. And how about the people who are now giving the Trump administration any benefit of the doubt when it comes to suppression of pro-Palestinian speech. Are they also obviously dupes? Or will we only say that in retrospect (we will definitely say that in retrospect).
Comment #247 March 13th, 2025 at 10:21 am
Fred #242, sneering remarks about Scott and Mossad do nothing to support your cause. Perhaps you are frustrated others are not sufficiently outraged and are withholding judgement, but acting on that frustration by sneering at our host with innuendo about Israeli intelligence does not help your cause. Maybe rethink your approach if you are indeed trying to persuade rather than troll?
Comment #248 March 13th, 2025 at 10:24 am
Adam Treat #241: yeah, this
“FWIW, the administration _has_ accused him of personally distributing flyers that had Hamas media logo on them and that celebrated the attack on the 7th. This accusation hasn’t been tested yet in a court of law, but if it is true and holds up then from my POV deportation would not necessarily be inappropriate.”
marks the point where we can agree to disagree and end the conversation. My view is: OF COURSE that should protected speech, which is not to say that a private university needs to permit it.
Comment #249 March 13th, 2025 at 10:29 am
Here’s an extremely useful analysis by Yale Law School’s Jed Rubenfeld, explaining why anyone who thinks the Khalil case is obvious is wrong.
Comment #250 March 13th, 2025 at 10:41 am
Adam Threat #247
Bro, I know you’re actively trying over and over to convince Scott that I should get banned, but you need to chill, that was clearly just a joke (the ‘:P’ is a hint)…
Comment #251 March 13th, 2025 at 10:43 am
@Theorist Israel #243: I’m with Vladeck in that the fact that the government might have a case to deport Khalil on what we know now, based on the law as it currently stands, is a sad indictment of the law. The “terrorism” carve outs, which were aggressively strengthened with the Patriot Act following 9/11 are free speech abominations. Speech policy should be as content neutral as possible, delineated according to “classes of speech.” It’s not hard to imagine another kind of administration trying to punish people for advocating policies that involve killing 30,000 innocent Palestinians and destroying 60% of civilian infrastructure in the region in order to wipe out Hamas, in response to Hamas’s killing 2000 innocent Jewish civilians. I mean, whether you agree with them, there are obvious and completely reasonable moral premises that would forbid taking such actions (such as those behind our policy in the US that we don’t blow up a building with civilian hostages in order to kill the terrorists), and which would lead people–yes, including those who are knowledgable about the situation, who have a priori love for Israel, and who are operating in good faith–to think of such actions as genocide. I certainly wouldn’t want that kind of speech to be punished.
Comment #252 March 13th, 2025 at 10:49 am
Scott #249
dang, that FreePress link appears to be behind a paywall (sadly not free as in “free beer”…).
Comment #253 March 13th, 2025 at 10:55 am
John #248
As far as I’m concerned, distributing Hamas leaflets celebrating Oct 7th is ENOUGH to warrant visa revocation and deportation, but it could also be protected free speech since apparently throwing Sieg Heils around (*) is protected free speech too (at least for US citizens).
(*) to me, enthusiastically making a Seig Heil is an explicit endorsement/celebration of the Holocaust, clear as blue sky.
Comment #254 March 13th, 2025 at 11:10 am
The thing that concerned me originally was that it was reported that the ICE agents had no idea the guy was even a permanent resident..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
“When the agents were informed that Khalil, of Palestinian and Syrian[4] nationality and Algerian citizenship,[5] was a lawful permanent resident of the United States in possession of a green card, they said they were revoking that instead”
If true, that indicates quite a level of sloppiness, i.e. they couldn’t have done that much of a thorough examination of the situation (i.e. a careful weighing of his status, free speech, etc), and showed that they just improvised on the fly because Student Visa revocation is a common thing for all sorts of technical issues while Permanent Residency revocation is serious (getting a Student Visa is an automatic process afaik, but Permanent Residency requires interviews, etc. So breaking the terms of a Permanent residency “oath” is a serious offense).
Of course it’s still possible that permanent residency doesn’t grant you any more protections than a student visa when you’re supporting terrorism.
Comment #255 March 13th, 2025 at 11:16 am
Fred #253: yeah, maybe I’m just more of a free speech absolutist than others on this thread. I think explicit endorsement of the Holocaust should be protected speech. (To be clear, I think such endorsements or even Musk’s Sig Heil and his reluctance/refusal to come out and clarify what it did or didn’t mean are completely despicable.)
Comment #256 March 13th, 2025 at 11:26 am
I’ve never been a free speech absolutist – I know it’s paradoxical, but I believe that we have the right to protect our societies from people who are abusing/subverting our freedoms to undermine democracy and the very freedoms we try to promote.
And, in practice, if you actually look closely at the people who claim to be free speech absolutists, you’ll see they’re the first to try and carve all sorts of exceptions too when they don’t agree with what’s being said (e.g. the Musks and JD Vances).
The truth is that there’s a fine line to walk, which is why such issues should be handled carefully, with openness and clear arguments. Unfortunately not something we can expect from the current administration.
Comment #257 March 13th, 2025 at 11:45 am
fred, ah that was an attempt at humor? We clearly don’t share the same sense of humor. Either way, I’m not trying to convince Scott of anything. Anyway, based on your last post – re: leaflets – it seems we are in agreement about something. Great.
Comment #258 March 13th, 2025 at 11:48 am
Fred #256: I wouldn’t call myself a “free speech absolutist.” I think I’m just closer to that end of the spectrum than many of the people on this thread seem to be (totally agree with your comment about the hypocrisy of many self-proclaimed free speech absolutists). I agree that societies have the right to protect against the subversion of their democracies. I just disagree that this should happen at the level of utterances, chants, handing out flyers, etc. I’m not claiming that it’s always easy to draw the line between what should be punishable versus not, but I do believe that we are best-served in the end if that line is a ways away from anything I’ve credibly heard that Khalil might’ve done.
Comment #259 March 13th, 2025 at 11:51 am
John #255
Just out of curiosity, to take a very practical case –
you then also believe that free speech ought to cover Alex Jones’ persistent claims about the Sandy Hook shooting (20 kids were slaughtered) :
” … that it was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by gun control advocates, that “no one died” in Sandy Hook, and that the incident was “staged”, “synthetic”, “manufactured”, “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Litigation
And then that Jones relentlessly broadcasting online that stuff to millions of followers is okay? I.e. forcing him to shut up is hurting our values more than letting him spew all that stuff?
And do you believe then that all of the civil suits against him from the victim families (resulting in his conviction for billion of dollars in damages) should just have been thrown out?
Comment #260 March 13th, 2025 at 1:48 pm
Fred #259: I don’t know much about the Alex Jones case, but I don’t think the civil suit was successful merely because he was broadcasting wild conspiracy theories. I believe it was because he was publicly defaming some of the parents of the murdered Sandy Hook children with things he knew were false.
Comment #261 March 13th, 2025 at 4:19 pm
Scott,
So: Will you, or will you not, condemn these “discord kids” as you condemn the “Hamasniks,” as you call them? As I explained to you, they are at least as virulently anti-semitic—not to mention misogynist—as the most fanatical Palestine protesters. Also, they make campuses uncomfortable and unsafe for women, Jewish students, black students, and many other minorities.
Comment #262 March 13th, 2025 at 5:18 pm
There has been much speculation on who Khalil is and what he stands for, based AFAICT only on his being of Palestinian origin and having been a negotiator w the Columbia admin in the anti-war protests. Here is some actual data, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-ice-green-card-hnk/index.html
“But long before he was arrested by federal agents Saturday night, Khalil told CNN he felt called to advocate for the liberation of both the Palestinian and Jewish people as a refugee.
“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.
“Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone,” he said.
…
Khalil grew up in Syria and earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Lebanese American University, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before enrolling at Columbia, he held multiple roles in international development, including with the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
In 2023, Khalil began studying to earn his master’s degree in public administration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Then, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Israel-Hamas War thrust Columbia University and its students into the national spotlight as pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept through college campuses.
Building on a tradition of student-led anti-war protests at Columbia, a coalition of students established encampments on campus, held rallies and staged “teach-ins.” But the movement was also tainted by instances of rampant antisemitism, which Khalil disavowed.
“There is, of course, no place for antisemitism,” he told CNN in April. “What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that’s taking different forms and antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism (are) some of these forms.””
[The last sentence sounds like it got a little bit garbled, I’d have to guess he was not saying different forms of anti-Palestinian sentiment but different forms of hatred or something like that.]
So that’s some evidence as to who he is. Against this, some MAGA people (possibly including Trump?) are claiming without showing any evidence that he distributed flyers with the Hamas logo; AFAICT this has not been stated in any of the court filings or official statements about his detention.
Comment #263 March 13th, 2025 at 5:30 pm
Scott #249: do you have a gift link or other unpaywalled version?
Comment #264 March 13th, 2025 at 5:42 pm
Scott #282:
Sorry, but I did not know much about Khalil or his organization prior to commenting. If they’re actually advocating what they seem to be advocating for then I agree with you.
Comment #265 March 13th, 2025 at 5:46 pm
There is much discussion about the loss of freedom of speech at Columbia in the NYT today (and probably here).
Which do you think is worse
Not being able to say what you to say
Forced to say what you don’t believe — a la DEI statements
Both are examples of a repressive power dynamic
Comment #266 March 13th, 2025 at 6:05 pm
John #181:
I’m curious about: what do you make of the many Jewish students at places like Harvard and Columbia who have joined “pro-Palestinian” protests? Do you believe that a large fraction of them are actually anti-semites? What do you make of scholars of the Holocaust, with parents who died in the Holocaust, who say that what Israel has done in response to October 7 has been grossly immoral?
I realize I’m way behind on answering questions in this thread, and I do intend to get to as many as I can. Since tonight is Purim, though, tangentially related to your question above, I thought I’d excerpt a tweet by the brilliant Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv is responding to a Guardian column by one of the world’s most prominent self-hating Jews, Peter Beinart, about how rather than celebrating Purim, Jews should use it to reflect on their own evil. Haviv writes:
The particulars change, but not the substance. Not the fundamental demand that Jews answer for some unique and history-altering villainy for which all Jews are deemed accountable and complicit.
Are you starting to see it?
The demand is powerful, because it always comes from a position of power. And it has felled many a Jew over the centuries, sad souls who sought safety from their oppressors first through acceptance of the iniquity ascribed to them and then by joining in the antisemite’s crusade to make other Jews do the same.
Nine hundred years ago, one tormented Jew succumbed to this relentless pressure, found relief in conversion and then enthusiastically joined in the holy effort to persecute the Jews. (To understand why they must be persecuted, read St. Augustine on the Jews. Or the relevant passages in the Quran.)
That Jew’s name was Theobald of Cambridge. He converted to Christianity and in service to his new faith brought forth the first known accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children. Thanks to the hard work of some concerned priests, his accusation spread like wildfire throughout Europe. Countless Jews would die in the ensuing centuries at the hands of those enraged by the blood libel.
And a Jew invented it. A Jew yearning for validation in the antisemite’s withering gaze, a Jew desperate to atone for the murder of God and the delay of history’s redemptive finale.
What Beinart now peddles to anyone willing to listen is an ideologically updated version of the same claim of deep-seated and defining criminality in the Jews. He confirms to our tormentors that this criminality is the distillation and apotheosis of the great evils of our age. And he demands a great accounting from the Jews.
All the Jews. Categorically.
And of course, the censorious Torquemadas of the Guardian, who would deem it bigotry to say such a thing about the world’s Muslims, consider it ennobling and virtuous to level this demand at the Jews. The Jews’ crime, after all, is no ordinary breach. It is, as ever, paradigmatic, culture-defining and history-altering.
And Beinart, like Theobald of old, surrenders himself to their holy judgment and demands that the rest of us do the same.
This is it, folks. This is the real thing.
Well done, Peter. You looked and looked and finally found it. Absolution. Acceptance. You are deemed righteous by those who see in the rest of us a great and abiding criminality. You are free at last. Of us, of our genocidal religion, of our child-murdering cabals. Be at ease.
Comment #267 March 13th, 2025 at 6:37 pm
Scott #266: geez, that’s a pretty harsh take on Beinart. Happy Purim?
Comment #268 March 13th, 2025 at 6:45 pm
John #267: I read Beinart’s column and considered it an entirely appropriate response.
If you need to put a question mark after “Happy Purim,” don’t bother.
Comment #269 March 13th, 2025 at 7:36 pm
Curious guy #261: Yes, I will condemn these people who I’ve barely heard of, who (thankfully) haven’t impinged on my world, but who sound entirely horrible. Certainly I condemn Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and every other right-wing antisemite I’m aware of. Certainly I’ve condemned every right-wing antisemite who’s ever shown up in this comment section.
While I’m at it, though, I’d also like to condemn what I’ve come to think of as the Problem of Presumptuousness. This is the problem of entitled commenters repeating the same question to me over and over, as if answering them was an obligation I owed them, as if they could take silence as an admission that I had no answer.
Dude. As hard as it might be to believe, I have a life beyond this blog. And I find myself less and less able to answer every comment as it comes, particularly the presumptuous ones.
Comment #270 March 13th, 2025 at 8:51 pm
Scott #206, John #181 Minority self-hatred by some members is nothing new. A college classmate was chief of infectious disease at one of the great Boston hospitals in the 80s as AIDS hit. He thought there was a tremendous amount of self-hatred among the homosexuals he cared for. I didn’t see it in the AIDS patients I saw with neurologic complications, however.
I cringed through a scene in a Woody Allen movie which had a Rabbi crawling around on the floor eating ham.
Happy Purim, it was one of the rare times when kids could make all the noise they wanted
Comment #271 March 13th, 2025 at 10:45 pm
Aaaaand here we go: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/nyregion/columbia-university-students-disciplined-hamilton-hall.html
Comment #272 March 13th, 2025 at 11:42 pm
we will see where the purge will end.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/11/mahmoud-khalil-green-card-deportation/
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/03/06/yls-places-research-scholar-on-immediate-administrative-leave-over-alleged-ties-to-terrorist-organization/
Comment #273 March 14th, 2025 at 12:33 am
Scott #239: “when a Western leftist hears about the Holodomor or Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward and says in so many words, “well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”—the question is, why should I be more charitable than I’d be to a far-rightist who has the same reaction to hearing about the Holocaust? Am I supposed to cut the leftist a break because their being on the left and not the right means that their heart was basically in the right place? This is precisely the step that I reject, and a lot of the rest of my beliefs follow from that rejection.”
I agree with you. (I don’t know any leftists who say those things tho.) But I don’t see the relevance to our conversation. You had argued (#202) that “the USSR really did maintain a vast network of fellow-travelers in the US as agents, with the ultimate goal of destroying the US” so “even when we look at [the McCarthy] era, as reprehensible as Joe McCarthy surely was, we do need to look at each case on its individual merits, rather than assuming that any accused Communist agent was just an innocent victim of McCarthyism.” I don’t disagree that there are some individual cases where some accusations have merit (albeit typically blown all out of proportion, as when Julius Rosenberg’s sins, and then Ethel’s virtual lack thereof, were turned into offenses punishable by death). There were lots of people who were members of the communist party in the 30’s and 40’s; I don’t know how many were “agents” (sources for “vast network”?) let alone having “the ultimate goal of destroying the US”. I argued (#223) that McCarthyism was primarily a right wing attack on the left, in this case the New Deal left, an attempt to suppress and destroy them and any influence they might have on government or society, much like the Trump admin now. And that almost all of its targets were idealists, the equivalent of progressives today, the New Deal left, who saw capitalism seeming to collapse under its own failures and injustices, and many of whom saw what they thought was a more humane model in socialism or communism, but also embraced the New Deal which was neither socialism nor communism. I don’t think most were thinking “what Stalin is building is better” (your #239), rather they believed in arguments for socialism and/or communism, and/or for social progressive measures like the New Deal, as opposed to the capitalist system they saw failing and abandoning working people to their fates, and also believed the Soviet Union was implementing those ideas. I don’t think most wanted to destroy the US, I think most wanted to make the US better and more humane, just like progressives today. Personally, I think their biggest mistakes might have been (1) in their desire for workers to be empowered, they ignored the devastating dangers of dictatorship, and the way that absolute power corrupts absolutely — you need to not just empower workers, you also need democracy (and markets where markets work, public goods where they don’t like health care, and …) (2) those who adhered to the CP were willing to ultimately be part of an organization run top down from Moscow, instead of a bottom-up, democratic organization.
So what do crazies who call themselves leftists who deny any horrors of Stalin or Mao, who I’ve never known even one of, have to do with the argument as to the nature of McCarthyism (and its relevance to what is going on today)? And in terms of relevance to today, I’ll note that Khalil is being tarred as a terrorist — including your belief that that is a high enough probability that you can’t condemn his detention — simply because he is Palestinian and was a negotiator in — associated with — the protests — and despite his own words that are the antithesis of being a jihadist or terrorist. And that is much like the tarring of people as subversives, communists, enemies of the state, for any association with the left, in the McCarthy period. Also relevant, of course, is the Trump/Musk claims to be attacking a marxist woke monster that has taken over the country with its ideological heart in the universities, which must therefore be destroyed or brought to heel.
Another thing you said in #239 is “just like the idiots of today think, “America and Israel do lots of bad things, therefore whatever alternative Iran, Hamas, and the Houthis are trying to create must be superior.”” I think you *really* are failing to hear what the vast majority opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza, worldwide, are saying. Most do not support religious fundamentalist dictatorships or those, like Hamas, that aspire to them, or jihad (tho I will agree there was way too much idiotic pro-Hamas sentiment expressed in the US college protests, but still, I think that was a small but loud minority of the protesters). People around the world are opposed to what they see as a war of Israel on the Gazan people, with virtually no regard for civilian casualties and in some cases a positive value to them, and on all their civilian institutions — medical, educational, food, water, energy, housing, … We could of course have a long discussion of that and the evidence around it, but at any rate, I think you have to understand that is what motivates the great bulk of the worldwide objections to the war, not a belief in the superiority of Iran and Hamas. Nor anti-semitism.
Comment #274 March 14th, 2025 at 12:46 am
And I should add beyond that, there are many protesters both appalled by the conduct of this war, but also more generally motivated by the larger issue of what they see as the systematic oppression of the Palestinians going back at least to the Nakba. But that does not mean they support religious fundamentalists nor terrorism nor killing civilians nor Hamas nor Oct. 7. Very many — I think the great bulk but I obviously can’t prove that — want, as Khalil said, freedom and justice for both Palestinians and Jews.
Comment #275 March 14th, 2025 at 1:07 am
Scott #266: self-hating Jews? Now there is a canard, a real slur. I’m Jewish, and extremely proud of it, as are pretty much all leftist Jews I know. Calling us names, slurs, is a way to avoid engaging the actual arguments. Please don’t do that. “Anti-semitism” is used to avoid criticisms of Israel from non-Jews, and it becomes “self-hating Jews” when it comes from Jews. (Of course there is also real anti-semitism.)
And I think what Beinart is saying is exactly the opposite of what the essayist you quoted is claiming. Beinart is saying that there are many things in our history, particularly our recent history including the holocaust, that lead us to think that we can only be the victims, not the oppressors. And that can blind us to the cases in which Jews are in fact the oppressors, in which Jews are the ones doing evil. He is not at all talking about “some unique and history-altering villainy for which all Jews are deemed accountable and complicit”, or “a deep-seated and defining criminality in the Jews … All the Jews. Categorically.” He is talking about very specific acts, very specific evils, that have been committed that he describes quite specifically. He is talking about the belief that we can only be victims, that we are unlike other human beings who can be both victim and victimizer, who have both capacities within them, and that failing to acknowledge that we are the same as all other humans in this way makes it difficult to look at, and to see, the specific evils he is talking about, they must all be categorically denied. So what he is saying is not that Jews are some kind of uniquely evil beasts, but quite the opposite: that Jews are the same as all other human beings, capable of being victims and victimizers, and we need to look honestly at both sides: We need to acknowledge our full humanity:
“Our communal story – told by Jewish leaders from Jerusalem to New York – is not wrong because it acknowledges the evil that Jews suffer, including the evil that Hamas committed on 7 October, and continues to commit by holding Israelis as hostage. The story is wrong because it denies the evil that Jews commit. Our refusal to reckon with the dark side of Purim reflects a refusal to reckon with the dark side of ourselves, to acknowledge our full humanity, which renders us capable of being not only victims, but victimizers as well.”
Comment #276 March 14th, 2025 at 7:37 am
Scott #366
Jeez, no wonder self-hatred to pay eternally for the original sin in the garden of eden is at the very core of Christianity!
And self-inflicted torture appears in many religions
https://ebnhussein.com/2021/08/09/the-origin-of-pagan-shia-self-flagellation-rituals-the-safavids-and-the-catholic-church/
The silver lining is that it doesn’t take much for the brain to morph pain into pleasure, and that’s true for self-inflicted physical pain (e.g. taking cold showers) and self-inflicted mental pain (e.g. posting in a blog).
Comment #277 March 14th, 2025 at 9:41 am
John #271
yea, at this point, if Columbia still wants funding from the US government, their best long term option would be to move to Israel.
Comment #278 March 14th, 2025 at 9:48 am
At least I’m “grateful” that Trump hasn’t sent (yet) the national guard to stop any campus anti-war protests, Vietnam-era style, like he said he would. But then I don’t think there are still many protests going on, even though he and Musk did their very best to trigger them with his Gaza Trump Resort PR campaign….
Comment #279 March 14th, 2025 at 12:46 pm
Quite mind blowing that the full force of the US government is flexing in order to punish a bunch of anti-war protesting students inside the confines of a private school
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rz4eqx4g7o
while the very same administration has set free hundreds of violent protesters who took over the Capitol (i.e the heart of our democracy) during which they assaulted cops and threatened the lives of our representatives…
Maybe next time those students could just try flying to Israel and take over the Knesset building?
Comment #280 March 14th, 2025 at 2:24 pm
Fred: For months, you have posted an immense quantity of weird, edgy comments that constantly toy with one of the world’s most popular antisemitic conspiracy theories (namely, that the US is under the control of Israeli government)—a theory that’s always had difficulty dealing with a big, obvious alternative explanation (namely, even after everything that’s happened over the past 18 months, defending Israel against Hamas remains popular with a majority of the American public, and politicians usually try to give their constituents what they want).
I’ve tolerated this, because you’re a commenter of extremely long standing here and didn’t seem motivated by ill will. But my tolerance is not infinite. I’ve brought down the ban-hammer on other obsessively conspiracizing commenters (for example, anti-vaxxers) and would do it in this case as well.
Comment #281 March 14th, 2025 at 2:59 pm
Ken (and others): I confess that I’ve never liked the term “self-hating Jew,” but that’s because it’s imprecise. In my experience, “self-hating Jews” are generally extremely pleased with themselves. The ones who they hate—the ones who they’d send to their deaths, if it would improve their own social status—are other Jews, the vast majority of the Jews who still exist after the Holocaust and all the rest.
Of course, often the “self-hating Jews” have turned out to be mistaken in their belief that the antisemites would spare them. The kapos, for example, and the members of the Judenraete, usually ended up in the gas chambers themselves, just slightly later than all the other Jews who they helped send there.
But it seems undeniable to me that this is not some minor detail, but an absolutely central part of the long, sad history of antisemitism. For 2000+ years, antisemites have justified their persecutions in large part via the testimony of Jews and former Jews who agreed with and amplified their charges. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Peter Beinart, and “Jewish Voice for Peace” aren’t innovators here, but just the most recent inheritors of that tradition.
At the same time, there have of course also been millions of proud Jews who are also leftists, who might severely criticize Israeli policy but should by no means be considered “self-hating Jews.” To give a few wildly different examples: Albert Einstein, Yitzhak Rabin, Steven Spielberg, Amos Oz.
How can we tell the difference between the two? For me, there’s actually an extremely simple test: would they suffer Israel to continue to exist? That is: would they allow half the world’s Jews to continue to defend themselves militarily, as Jews, against neighbors who’ve sworn a thousand more October 7ths?
If they would suffer Israel to continue existing, then they’re just liberal Zionists. Their arguments are all internal arguments within Zionism. I probably agree with them about many or most things myself—but even when I don’t, I welcome their disagreement.
If, however, they wouldn’t allow Israel—if they keep repeating the fantasy that Israel’s Jews can somehow still be safe after they’re disarmed and their “settler-colonial ethnostate” is dismantled—then I’d say that they do meet the central definition of “self-hating Jew,” which is a willingness to send millions of other Jews to near-certain death in order to improve their own social position in the Gentile world. And I’m actually less likely than I am with anti-Israel Gentiles to give these Jews any benefit of the doubt, that they don’t fully understand that this is what they’re advocating.
Happy Purim!
Comment #282 March 14th, 2025 at 3:24 pm
Norman Finkelstein is in fact against the BDS movement because he believes in the cause of existence of the state of Israel.
Comment #283 March 14th, 2025 at 3:43 pm
Ken #273
“People around the world are opposed to what they see as a war of Israel on the Gazan people, with virtually no regard for civilian casualties and in some cases a positive value to them…”
Yes, agreed. That’s why these protests were always full of people calling for the release of the hostages and for Hamas to surrender which would have ended the fighting almost immediately.
Oh, hang on…
Comment #284 March 14th, 2025 at 4:01 pm
RB #282: Wow! I didn’t know that about Finkelstein, and I give him credit for it. Unfortunately, I also have to give him “credit” for innumerable statements like this one, from the immediate aftermath of October 7:
If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery; if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled. The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down. Glory, glory, hallelujah. The souls of Gaza go marching on!
Comment #285 March 14th, 2025 at 4:16 pm
Incidentally, the uncritical use of the term “Nakba,” as in Ken’s comment #274, is one danger sign of the pathologies I described in #281. As Ken either knows or should know, for decades “Nakba” simply meant: the failure of five Arab armies to destroy the fledgling Israel and exterminate all the Jews there, as they had planned to do. Only later, after it was found that this aroused little sympathy in the West, was the word “Nakba” redefined to mean the expulsion of Arabs from what became Israel. Meanwhile no one — not the UN, not human rights organizations, not the tentifada people — has ever shed a tear over the equal number of Jews who were expelled from their homes in the Arab world at the same time, or raised the possibility of any “right of return” for them, which is the proof of the breathtaking hypocrisy of the whole enterprise. The two-state solution would mean homes and autonomy for the grandchildren of everyone uprooted in the 1948 war, but if Israel would still exist then it isn’t of interest.
Comment #286 March 14th, 2025 at 4:25 pm
Scott #284,
Finkelstein has later sounded a bit regretful for making those comments. I won’t defend him for making them however. For him, the comparison is with the Warsaw ghetto uprising that his parents were part of.
Comment #287 March 14th, 2025 at 4:31 pm
RB #286:
He has drawn comparison though with the Warsaw ghetto uprising that his parents were part of.
Honestly, that sounds more like a matter for his psychiatrist than for the wider world. Even facing imminent annihilation, as the people of Gaza weren’t, the Warsaw ghetto Jews still didn’t indiscriminately butcher German or Polish civilians.
Comment #288 March 14th, 2025 at 4:45 pm
Scott #280
thanks for your patience (it’s your blog), I do agree that at this point it’s counterproductive for me to make the same points over and over and unfair to others and you to use this blog to vent my frustrations, and this will be my last post about anything related to Gaza and Israel and the Pro-Palestine protests and matters of free speech and antisemitism here in the U.
But as a final counterpoint (that I hope you will graciously allow me), what you qualify as conspiracy is simply what Bernie Sanders (a very respectable person imo) is saying out loud
https://youtu.be/G-X_9cLDaDY?si=tYPG-ufj8Qry8hDZ
now I shut up, good luck.
Comment #289 March 14th, 2025 at 5:28 pm
Scott, you wrote:
“For me, there’s actually an extremely simple test: would they suffer Israel to continue to exist?”
I think the answer is that yes, most people feel that Israelis have a general right to defend themselves against attack. The major disagreements are over how. To many, killing 30,000+ innocent civilians and destroying 60% of buildings in Gaza in response to the October 7 attack is simply going way too far, is disproportionate and immoral, and is not excused by the reality that Hamas is embedded amongst civilians. Arguments about how this is in line with civilian-to-combatant deaths during WWII are also not convincing to many people. That was a horrifying time, and a lot of the actions we’ve taken since then as an international community have been aimed at avoiding those kinds of civilian death tolls/ratios. I think one of the issues in these conversations is that those supporting Israel’s actions are often not willing to draw any line whatsoever. They’re not willing to say even that killing a million or a billion Palestinian children (if there were that many) would be going too far. If they have to kill a million Palestinian children, well, that’s unfortunate, but it’s Hamas’ fault, is the tenor of one side of the conversation. I’m sorry, but most people who grew up in the West with liberal values are not going to go for that. Ever. They wouldn’t for Israel or for any other country (including the US whose actions in Iraq led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians). If the choice at this moment is to either destroy a region entirely and kill tens of thousands of kids in order to secure something close to zero Israeli deaths, or to spend years going after Hamas in ways that avoid killing so many kids but are more costly on the Israeli side (especially in terms of the soldiers who’d be fighting those battles), I think most people would choose the latter, it is true. But it’s not primarily because of anti-semitism.
Can we get back to Columbia?
Comment #290 March 14th, 2025 at 5:28 pm
Scott #287
Last comments on Finkelstein, this is going off territory for this post. Its not a subconscious thing for him. He has always been very overt about why he draws the correlation with his parents’ experience e.g.
Comment #291 March 14th, 2025 at 11:54 pm
Scott (and I will acknowledge re #269, I can imagine that endlessly answering questions of the nature ‘do you deny’, ‘will you condemn’, ‘do you agree with statement X’, etc. must be exhausting, and moreover, that you have no obligation to do so), but I am curious about your general attitude towards the Palestinians. Within this thread you’ve both assumed that Mahmoud Khalil is guilty by association (without any evidence presented as of yet) and that the “neighbors” of Israel (re #281) are all ravaging murders intent on the destruction of the Jews. It’s not clear to me whether you mean Hamas (who, to my knowledge, number ~20,000) or the Palestinians in Gaza (who number ~2.1M). It’s difficult for me to imagine everyone in Gaza feels this way, but okay (I will also just point out that if we learned something from Afghanistan it was that the wholesale occupation of a people — and apparently their indiscriminate killing — did not result in a situation where they felt they owed us any favors).
Can I pose a hypothetical? Suppose Hamas announced that they planned to murder one Israeli every day for the next month. And suppose in retaliation that the Israeli’s in response announced a retaliatory attack in which they would kill Palestinians by an increasing power of 2 every day in which Hamas committed their attack.
The math is straightforward of course – after a week, Hamas has killed 7 Israelis, and Israel has killed a total of 254 Palestinians. After two weeks, Hamas has killed 14 Israelis, and similarly 32,766 Palestinians are dead. By day 20, 20 Israelis have been killed, and the entirety of Gaza has been exterminated.
At what point does this math become uncomfortable? The example is obviously impossible. But I think it does ask a meaningful question — at what point can we all agree that something is happening that is disproportionate?
Comment #292 March 15th, 2025 at 2:03 am
Scott #281: Wow. Chomsky, Beinart and Finkelstein are the equivalent of kapos and judenraete? Kapos and judenraete sent tens or hundreds or thousands or more Jews to their deaths to save their own skin (and used their tiny bit of power to dominate and brutalize the Jews below them, in the case of at least some kapos). I think you first have to grant that those three are very sincere, and do not have any desire to see Jews killed, and are motivated by looking for a solution that is just and in which everyone has equal rights and is secure. You may think they’re insane to believe that that is the outcome that would result from what they propose, but that would make them misguided, not kapos or judenraete.
But let’s delve a little deeper. Take Beinart. He was an advocate of a two-state solution for a very long time. At some point he decided that Israel had purposely created enough facts on the ground, i.e. the settlements, to make that impossible, it was a nice ideal to espouse but it simply could not happen. And what we have instead is a one-state solution with Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea and Palestinian subjugation throughout outside of Israel proper. (If you’re tempted to argue “Jews did not have sovereignty over Gaza”, please leave it, that’s an endless argument, just accept the statement for the sake of argument and of understanding Beinart’s thinking; it is what is believed and can be defended, even if you dispute it.) And so he decides that the only possible improvement is to take this one-state solution and make it democratic, with everyone having equal rights and secure. It is very nearly impossible to get there from here, difficult and a long road, but the alternative is the current undemocratic and oppressive one-state solution. Now you may reject every one of those arguments. But can you see that it is a sincere position of a person really wrestling with the problem and trying to find a path to a just solution for all? And has nothing to do with anyone’s “willingness to send millions of other Jews to near-certain death in order to improve their own social position in the Gentile world.” It’s precisely how to get from here to there safely that he would argue, I think, is the almost impossible problem that must be solved, somehow (and requires opposing what is seen as the egregious forms of oppression of Palestinians that go far beyond the requirement of self-defense — even if you think there are no such things, that is not the belief of all people who are not kapos or judenraete) — the problem that must be solved somehow through some very long-term process, because, he would argue, the two-state solution is even more impossible.
When you’re dealing with people who obviously are tormented by the injustice and devoting intense intellectual energy to trying to find a just solution for all — who are not in the business of slaughtering civilians or setting up fundamentalist religious dictatorships or trying to lead one side to destroy the other — then, even if you disagree with them on every argument and every fact, is it not possible for you to have the empathy to see them as sincere human beings with good motivations who you disagree with as to the facts of the world, rather than kapos or judenraete who are willing to sacrifice millions to be esteemed by the gentiles?
Chomsky, I might be wrong, but my understanding was he opposed BDS for Israel proper (as opposed to the occupied territories) because he saw it as having a goal of the dissolution of Israel, and he was opposed to that.
Myself, tho you didn’t ask: my take is the Israel/Palestine issue is the only one I know where each side can tell a completely convincing story of all the oppression and injustice they have suffered for much of a century, and how almost everything they did was what they had to do in response to that oppression and injustice. (Now obviously the slaughter and hostage-taking of 10/7 is not part of such a convincing story, nor is the indiscriminate bombing that has probably killed 3% of the Gazan population and the utter destruction of and blockade of Gaza etc. etc. — but at least overall, they each have a convincing story.) I also think in the Netanyahu years the level of Israel’s injustice to Palestinians has amped up enormously so that things have gotten much more one-sided, just so you know what I think, I don’t want to argue about it. As for a solution, like different levels of infinity, I think there are different levels of impossibility. I think a just one-state solution (unlike the current unjust one-state solution) and a two-state solution are both impossible, but I think a just one-state solution is a higher level of impossible, so I can only continue to hope for the impossible two-state solution. You will tell me it’s been available to the Palestinians many times and they have rejected it in favor of wanting to slaughter the Israelis; I will tell you that the Palestinians have been willing to pursue a two-state solution many times in which Israelis thwarted it; and we could argue about that forever. Let’s not.
From what I have seen you say, I think I very deeply disagree with you on many fundamental facts and arguments about the situation there. But I respect you and appreciate your sincerity and motivation and desire for justice. I don’t and won’t call you names, like say genocidaire, and don’t at all think they apply to you. Can you not extend the same respect, and attempt at understanding, to the other side, rather than calling them kapos and judenraete or self-hating Jews?
Comment #293 March 15th, 2025 at 3:06 am
Scott #285: I had never heard that the word “nakba” initially referred to the loss of the 1948 war by the Arab states rather than the expulsion of Palestinians. I looked it up and I think it’s a myth. The word nakba was first used in this way, apparently, by Constantin Zureiq in 1948. It referred to the expulsion of the Palestinians, but the difference is he thought that the expulsion was due to the Arab armies losing the war rather than to being driven out by the Zionist/Israeli armies. That’s what seems to have been distorted into the version you gave, at least AFAICT from quick googling — I’m no authority on the subject. (Here is one source: https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-help-debunk-the-Zionist-claim-that-Nakba-was-coined-by-Constantine-Zureiq-and-that-it-only-referred-to-the-military-loss-and-not-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-Palestinians. If you look up Constantin Zureiq in Wikipedia, it says in the text what you said, but in the footnotes it says he coined the word to refer to the expulsion of the Palestinians.) Later historians — primarily I think the Israeli New Historians — established how the Zionist armies systematically drove most out, with 300,000 of the 750,000 who were expelled pushed out before the war even started. But I have seen what you said in some extreme pro-Israel writings. The idea that the essential idea was “failure to exterminate the Jews” goes along with those viewpoints I guess.
I brought it up not to try to prosecute the Palestinian case, but because I had said most people opposing the Gaza war were opposed to the war on the Gazan people and civilization, but I realize I had left out those who also see it in the context of what they see as the long history of Palestinian oppression going back at least to the nakba. So I thought I should point out that viewpoint as well.
As for why people constantly bring this up but not the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries — there’s an obvious reason. The Jews expelled from Arab countries are not currently suffering any oppression that the world is concerned with, nor are they seeking to return to their old homes. That is old history. The Palestinians are in a state of oppression the world is concerned with, and still have no land of their own, and the Nakba is part of the story of that oppression. There is also an Israeli story, I am not trying to say one is the Truth. It is perhaps worth noting that, in the case of Iraq, Israeli operatives did false flag bombing operations against the Iraqi Jews to make them feel attacked by their neighbors, with whom they were living peacefuly, and get them to flee to Israel. Whether that kind of thing happened anywhere else I don’t know, but I at least haven’t heard of it happening in other countries where Jews fled.
Comment #294 March 15th, 2025 at 3:34 am
TY #283: ““People around the world are opposed to what they see as a war of Israel on the Gazan people, with virtually no regard for civilian casualties and in some cases a positive value to them…”
Yes, agreed. That’s why these protests were always full of people calling for the release of the hostages and for Hamas to surrender which would have ended the fighting almost immediately.
Oh, hang on…”
You’re ignoring a crucial point. Israel could not prosecute that war without US and more generally Western support. What they are doing depends on the policies of the country (or countries) in which we live. Hamas does not depend on our countries, is not swayed by our countries, would not be changed or swayed by our countries making changes in their policies or by our protests. The war on Gaza (as opposed to on Hamas) is something *we* are engaged in, and we want to change that. Hamas’ actions are not anything we are engaged in or we can have any influence over. Hence protests are focused on the war on Gaza. Most (but not all, unfortunately) protesters would also condemn the killing of civilians and taking of hostages, but it’s not the focus of the protests.
As US citizens or westerners we have a special interest in Israel’s actions. And also, for the same reason that many Jews have a special interest in Israel which they focus on defending Israel against criticism, many Jews have a special interest in Israel that, in present circumstances, gets focused on seeing that Israel not be a perpetrator of the things we as Jews have always been taught to be opposed to. Don’t want to argue about that, just to say that Jews on both sides have a special interest in israel.
Finally, the idea that release of the hostages would end the war is false. There have been many offers to release all the hostages in return for Israel ending the war and withdrawing from (or not entering) Gaza, starting as early as Oct 9 up through the present ceasefire, and Netanyahu has made clear he is not going to withdraw from Gaza. Now you said the war would end if Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders. That’s probably true. Most wars would end if the other side surrenders. You can force an enemy to surrender through complete military victory. But short of that, it’s pretty unheard of for one side to just surrender to the other side so a war will end. If they were going to do that, there probably wouldn’t be any war in the first place. It’s not exactly a realistic idea.
Comment #295 March 15th, 2025 at 11:14 am
Ken #292:
“I will tell you that the Palestinians have been willing to pursue a two-state solution many times in which Israelis thwarted it…”.
Have you ever listened to what regular Palestinians themselves say/want?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvdFFStvvi0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry6kpYFHnxs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNh-kW8RhmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VqmUgami_Y
Comment #296 March 15th, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Ken #292: No, I won’t call you a kapo or Judenraete. The reason I won’t is that you’ve now endorsed, as “less impossible,” a two-state solution where Israel gets to continue to exist and therefore half the world’s Jews get to continue to live. Thank you for that. As I said, this is my line. Beinart has now placed himself on the other side of it, and I thought Chomsky was a “one-stater” also. I guess it’s cool that he opposes BDS; maybe that changes his moral score from -1000000 (where it’s been since he denied Pol Pot’s genocide, and sneered at those calling attention to it) to -999000.
Incidentally, the two-state solution seems impossible now, but it was close repeatedly. I think it would’ve now been reality if Arafat had been someone else, or if Rabin hadn’t been assassinated. Even now, if Bibi finally gets replaced by a more moderate coalition, Israel might agree in return for normalization with Saudi Arabia … and then this ball would once again be back in the Palestinians’ court, where it’s been fumbled so many times.
You say the world doesn’t care about the million Sephardic Jews who were expelled from their homes in the Arab world, had all their possessions stolen, etc, because those Jews and their descendants are now thriving in Israel. Here you’re tantalizingly close to the heart of this! Why aren’t the Arab refugees now thriving in Arab countries that welcomed them as citizens, or in a Palestinian state that could’ve been created anytime between 1948 and 1967 or multiple times afterward? There’s only one reason: because this would end the dream of destroying Israel and killing or expelling all its Jews. The majority of the Palestinians, their leaders, and their backers have again and again preferred for the Palestinians to live in misery than to give up on the genocidal dream. That is the core of the issue.
Anyway, now that we’ve circled back to the same old debate—the debate that I expressly wanted this thread to avoid—it’s time to wrap up the thread. Get in any last comments before I close it later today.
Comment #297 March 15th, 2025 at 12:31 pm
Chomsky is a two-stater and states that it is Israel that is not a two-stater:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/4/9/qa-noam-chomsky-on-palestine-israel-and-the-state-of-the-world
Comment #298 March 15th, 2025 at 1:15 pm
Scott #172 says “(2) Calls for genocide, and other incitements to violence, should not be protected academic speech.”
I get where this is coming from but I think this is misguided and universities should follow the first amendment here. (To be clear, private universities are not legally bound by the first amendment, but it is still a sensible and carefully thought-through framework of how to balance free speech with other considerations.)
If someone wants to advocate for war, say in support of the US’s invasion of Iraq, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then that is political speech which should be permitted. If someone wants to speak in favor of violence by non-state actors, like the Irish Republican Army, then that should still be protected speech. The same logic says that speaking in favor of terrorism, genocide, lynching, etc, should be allowed.
What crosses the line, in 1st-amendment jurisprudence, is inciting specific crimes. If you say that we should commit genocide in general, that is allowed. If you say that we should start on Thursday with this particularly person, then that is illegal incitement. I am oversimplifying a bit but that is roughly the criterion. It is also ok to ban harassment. If you make your pro-violence arguments right in front of Hillel, disrupt classes, block people who are trying to move around campus, etc, then you’re creating a hostile climate and that can be restricted. But for this, the content is secondary; the same argument would apply if you disrupted a class by playing loud music.
And I think this is the right way to go for universities, for all the standard arguments (banning speech doesn’t convince people, someday the laws may be used in a way you don’t like, etc.)
Comment #299 March 15th, 2025 at 1:32 pm
Scott #296
https://chomsky.info/noam-chomsky-maintains-the-rage/
If this is a reflection of Chomsky’s present-day beliefs, it’s clear that he doesn’t like or support the Khmer Rouge. In fact,
> It was exploited quite explicitly to whitewash past US crimes in Indochina, and to lay the groundwork for new and quite awful crimes in Central America, justified on grounds that the US had to stop the “Pol Pot left”, We compared Cambodia to East Timor, accurately: two huge atrocities in the same time period and same area of the world, differing in one crucial respect: in East Timor the US and its allies had primary responsibility for the atrocities, and could have easily brought them to an end; in Cambodia they could do little or nothing – as noted, there was scarcely even a suggestion – and the enemy’s atrocities could be and were exploited to justify our own.
he clearly calls them “atrocities.”
Comment #300 March 15th, 2025 at 1:59 pm
Scott #296 well, i was trying, but obviously failing, to make you see the error of calling people like Beinart names like kapo or judenraete. You think what he is advocating would lead to the extermination of Israeli Jews. The crucial thing is, *that is not what he believes*. He believes we have an unjust one-state solution, and ultimately the only way out of that is a just one-state solution. He’s not advocating the borders be dissolved tomorrow. He’s advocating that as a long term goal, along some long, winding, to be created-over-time path. And that long-term goal is one in which all the people living in the current one-state are secure and safe and have equal rights. And in the short term he opposes the many ways Palestinians are oppressed that are well beyond any self-defense needs. You think he is *misguided*; you think his long term goal couldn’t be achieved, and seeking it as a long term goal can only result in the extermination of Israeli Jews. But you don’t call him misguided. You call him a rat who will sacrifice millions of people to promote himself or to save himself. That’s just wrong, Scott.
I’m done.
Comment #301 March 15th, 2025 at 2:13 pm
TY #295: you post videos of Palestinians saying, to make a crude one word summary, genocidal things about Israeli Jews. Do you realize how easy it would be to create similar videos of Israeli after Israeli saying genocidal things about Palestinians? We should kill them all, we should force them all out, we should kill their children because they will only grow up to be terrorists, I’m proud of how many Arabs I’ve killed, they’re animals, they’re subhuman, there are no innocent Gazans, and on and on. There are plenty of Israelis, including govt leaders, who believe and say these things. Given a diverse population, with selective sampling you can make the population appear to uniformly believe many many different things.
Comment #302 March 15th, 2025 at 3:03 pm
@John #251 “killing 30,000 innocent Palestinians”
@John #289 “killing 30,000+ innocent civilians”
Where is this number of 30,000 innocent civilians coming from? Does anyone actually know how many civilians have been killed? Does anyone know how many of these civilians were killed by Hamas’ own fire? Does anyone know how many of these civilians are innocent?
To me the prototypical innocent civilian casualty is someone unaffiliated with Hamas, minding their own business, and somehow, through no fault or agency of their own, ending up with a missile coming through their living room. How many Gazan casualties fit that description?
What brought this question home to me was an interview Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times did with United States Senator Fetterman in October 2024. The following excerpted passage was in reference to Hezbollah, not Hamas, but the take-away is the same:
Garcia-Navarro: Last month, the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, they issued a joint statement where they condemned you for saying that you loved Israel’s pager attacks targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Fetterman: “I do. Absolutely.”
Garcia-Navarro: Well, they said, “When our elected officials start condoning the civilian loss of life, our collective moral compass is irreparably harmed.” That’s a quote. And indeed, that attack did hurt and maim civilians.
Fetterman: “It didn’t. It actually, it was targeted for members of Hezbollah. No one uses beepers in that situation other than they were a member of Hezbollah.”
Garcia-Navarro: There was the young child of a —
Fetterman: “That was a micro-targeting to minimize —”
Garcia-Navarro: There was a young child who was killed, who was taking the pager to their parent.
Fetterman: “Unfortunately, tragically, because daddy was a member of Hezbollah. That’s tragic. He brought that danger and evil into their home. And that’s what tragically resulted in that poor child’s death, and that’s what’s so terrible. She paid the price because her father was a terrorist for Hezbollah.”
Comment #303 March 15th, 2025 at 6:15 pm
Ken #302:
“you post videos of Palestinians saying, to make a crude one word summary, genocidal things about Israeli Jews”.
The overwhelming majority were not saying “genocidal things” so it is clear you commented on something you had not even watched.
Comment #304 March 15th, 2025 at 7:02 pm
I’m getting in just at the finish line, and I wish I had something more original to say than to repeat something I said in a prior Israel-related thread, but I feel it bears restating: Scott: I really cannot emphasise enough that in my experience, most leftists who blithely parrot anti-Israeli rhetoric are not doing so from a place of being fine with the idea of its Jewish population being murdered, but in a crushingly earnest belief that they really *would* be fine in a one-state solution. The capacity for self-delusion knows no bound when the alternative seems, put bluntly, too racist to be true. “They would be massacred en masse in a majority-Muslim Palestine” is not an uncomfortable reality they turn a blind eye to; it is something that genuinely does not compute. Something they reject as obviously untrue because… it can’t be, surely? Because the reality where that’s true would be too horrible to bear.
This isn’t an excuse for them, just a correction to what I think is still a faulty model of their thinking on your (and many other people’s) part. Though I will say that, having internalised it, it leads me to feel less burning *rage* at pro-Hamas sentiment than you do, just a kind of exhausted fatalism at the foolishness of the human race.
As a secondary and unrelated point (and one I don’t think I *have* made before in this comment section in quite this way), I do also want to register my discomfort with the way you define/use the term “Zionist”, which I think too easily turns into a motte-and-bailey. Though this isn’t to say that you use it as a m&b, at least consciously. As I have also said before: I unequivocally support Israel’s *continued* existence, now that it exists. But this needn’t imply that I endorse you view that Israel’s existence is-and-was-always the *only* lasting solution to ensure the safety of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.
One can support Israel’s continued existence while thinking that it needn’t, and perhaps oughtn’t, have been founded; in much the same way that someone could say of an unwanted child a mother was forced to carry, “I think it would be better if she’d had the right and means to abort that child”, while in no way thinking this is grounds to murder the grown man that child became. I think “Zionist” ought to be reserved for people who agree with you on the *necessity* of Israel, and it is misleading — and not in line with common usage — to define the term as “anyone who approves of the *continued* existence of Israel”. I would happily describe myself as pro-Israel, in the narrow “I think Israel should keep existing” sense; whereas to call myself a “Zionist”, albeit a “liberal Zionist”, would imply I agreed with “Zionism” as an underlying ideology, i.e. with a complex set of political and historical theories that span centuries, and about which I am agnostic at best.
Comment #305 March 15th, 2025 at 7:23 pm
Emund #305: As I said, I’m ready to give many Gentile anti-Zionists the benefit of the doubt that they really don’t understand this, especially if they moderate their positions as they learn more. But anti-Zionist Jews? How could they possibly not understand that the IDF, love it or hate it, is all that stands between 7 million Jews and their annihilation?
Meanwhile, we need a name for those who believe that modern Israel should never have been created, but now that it exists it needs to be preserved and defended. What about “shotgun Zionists”? 🙂