When America criminalised freedom of expression

In a presentation he delivered in 1860, shortly before the Civil War began, in which he addressed the subject of freedom of expression at an Abolitionist meeting, African American author, reformer and statesman Fredrick Douglass, said: "No right was deemed by the Founding Fathers more sacred than the right of free speech. It was, in their eyes as in the eyes of other thoughtful men, the great renovator in society".

Today, that right, enshrined as it is in the First Amendment, is a right that anyone who lives in America as a citizen or a lawful permanent resident is entitled to and can be taken for granted as a right that shall be exercised openly, without fear of retribution. 

Or is it?

The Mahmoud Khalil Affair, which is morphing before our eyes into a mini Affaire Dreyfus - the political scandal that in 1894 rocked the public discourse in France - is already raising very serious doubts about whether free speech in America in our time remains free and thus no one need fear "the midnight knock on the door" associated with police states.

Khalil, 30, a Palestinian graduate student activist at Columbia University and a lawful resident with a Green Card was arrested at home on Saturday by federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security and flown to Louisiana to be detained in a jail where immigrants are held pending deportation. And on Monday, President Trump warned that the arrest would be "the first of many to come", as his administration proceeds to crack down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the country. The agents never revealed to the media why Khalil was being transferred from New York, where he lives, to a jail 1,400 miles away in the Deep South.

"We know there are more students at Columbia and other Schools, Colleges and Universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic activity", wrote the president on Truth Social. "We will find, apprehend and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our Country - never to return again. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. No Masks".

Chilling, no?

Also on Monday, the Education Department warned some 60 colleges, including Ivy League ones like Harvard - mostly ones where pro-Palestinian protests erupted last year - that they could lose federal funds if they did not block these demonstrations on their campuses, demonstrations the government agency has facilely dubbed "antisemitic". (Columbia, considered the bete noire among those campuses, has already had $400 million in federal grants and contracts cut off on account of its "failure to combat antisemitism on campus".) 

How did Khalil become, you ask, the first protester to be targeted for deportation?

According to a news report in the Forward, the oldest and most prestigious Jewish publication in the US, Khalil had showed up at a demonstration last week without a mask and clips of him in a sit-in outside a library at Barnard, Columbia's sister university, "circulated online, and groups like Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus singled him out and called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport him". (On Monday, Jesse Furman, a federal judge, who happens to be Jewish, blocked Khalil's deportation and ordered a full hearing to take place two days later.)

The day following the arrest, America's Secretary of State wrote in a social media post: "We will be revoking the visas and/or the Green Cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported". The term "Hamas supporters" is now used generically against anyone critical of Israel or, conversely, supportive of Palestinian rights. And it's all, to repeat, part of President Trump's campaign pledge and his party's long-held commitment to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism in the United States, the land where your constitutional right to speak freely, regardless of how eccentric or adversarial your views are, is jealously guarded by the Constitution.

And, what, pray tell, are these folks so afraid of? So afraid as to send agents from the Department of Homeland Security - a government agency with offices in 235 US cities and 90 other offices in 50 countries, whose proclaimed goal is to "shield our nation from global threats and to ensure Americans are safe and secure" - to arrest a student activist who acted just as you would've expected a student activist to act.

We all remember the time when we too were young student activists, at a demonstration, a rally, a sit-in, a march, imbued with the idealistic elan that youth had conferred on us, and imbued equally with the exhilaration we derived from knowing we were part of a collective identity defined by its need to see a more just, more morally- anchored world. For students, student activism was then, and remains today, a way of life. To retard, impede or block that way of life is to muzzle, again in the words of Fredrick Douglass, the "great moral renovator in society" that is free speech. Sadly that is happening in the US as, puns aside, we speak.

Yet, on Tuesday, March 4, President Donald Trump delivered an address to a joint session of Congress in which he actually said - this columnist will kid you not - that his administration "brought free speech back to America".

Hmm! Food for thought here, no?

Fawaz Turki, a distinguished academic, journalist, and author residing in Washington DC, wrote The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.