Imagine a Nazi sympathizer from Germany living in New York City and studying at Columbia. He’s not a U.S. citizen, but he has a green card. For many months, he has been leading protests on campus with fellow Ku Klux Klan members where he promotes a hateful, racist agenda.
After being arrested and targeted for deportation by federal authorities, he becomes a cause célèbre among the conservative right. They argue that his free speech rights are being violated.
Liberal groups are repulsed by this defense of a bigot. There is no place in America for such blatant racism, they cry out, especially when it comes from a noncitizen abusing the privileges of his residency status.
The right is undaunted. Yes, the speech is hateful, they concede, but it doesn’t violate the nation’s free speech laws. This is about the sacred right to express one’s views. They turn the Nazi sympathizer into a free speech martyr, with conservatives across the nation rallying to his cause.
This is pretty much where we’re at with former Columbia student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who has been arrested and is targeted for deportation. His defenders have launched a national campaign asserting his innocence and defending his rights.
Khalil is a man with hateful views, but just like the fictitious Nazi above, his speech is protected by our nation’s free speech laws.
Among his offenses, Khalil has glorified the terror group Hamas that committed the most vicious mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. He was a ringleader for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group that led the anti-Israel protests on Columbia’s campus and cheered the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. “The act of Palestinian resistance on Oct. 7, known as the Al-Aqsa Flood, breached Israeli security and made significant military advances,” his group wrote, adding that it was “a day that will go down in history.”
Defenders of Khalil would rather not delve into his hateful views; they emphasize instead that his rights are being violated. I read a strong piece in City Journal by Erielle Azerrad, an attorney who specializes in anti-terrorism litigation, arguing that “deporting Hamas supporters like Mahmoud Khalil is perfectly legal.”
But let’s assume it’s not. Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the Khalil case is indeed only about his free speech rights.
Are his defenders ready to go down that road?
“It’s funny how quickly the left moves from arguing that ‘speech is violence’ to embracing a maximalist stance on free expression,” Abe Greenwald writes in Commentary. “The same mobs who wanted you punished for using the wrong pronoun are now the country’s most passionate defenders of the First Amendment.”
As a passionate defender of the First Amendment myself, I’m ready to go down that road. I’m willing to tolerate protected speech that may offend Jews, Muslims, transgenders, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, whites, the rich, the poor or any other type of American. That doesn’t make me a masochist; it makes me a freedom lover.
As I see it, tolerating offensive speech is the price we must pay for the freedom to think and speak as we wish. There’s no such thing as a “right to not be offended.” It’s something we invented. It’s nowhere in the Constitution.
But are righteous defenders of Mahmoud Khalil ready for such a free speech free-for-all? Are they ready for an America where everyone is free to offend as long as the speech is protected? As they demonstrate for Khalil’s right to defend terrorists, are they ready to defend the right of Nazi sympathizers to spew their own hateful rants on a college campus?
It’s easy to defend a hater whose hateful views against Israel don’t bother you. But what about a hater whose views you absolutely abhor?
Until Khalil’s defenders are willing to defend the speech rights of all haters, their high-minded talk of free speech will be nothing more than faux speech.
